Walter R. Mebane

The Wrong Man is President! Overvotes in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida

Using ballot-level data from the NORC Florida ballots project and ballot-image files, I argue that overvoted ballots in the 2000 presidential election in Florida included more than 50,000 votes that were intended to go to either Bush or Gore but instead were discarded. This was primarily due to defective election administration in the state, especially the failure to use a system to warn each voter when too many marks were on a ballot and allow the voter to make corrections. If the best type of vote tabulation system used in Florida in 2000—precinct-tabulated optical scan ballots—had been used everywhere in the state, Gore would have won by more than 30,000 votes. Floridas election experience points to the need to gather ballot-level data to evaluate the success of election reform efforts now underway in much of the United States. Walter R. Mebane Jr. has published numerous articles concerning topics in American politics, especially elections, and political methodology. An early version of this work was presented at a seminar at the University of Minnesota in April 2003. The author thanks Jason Conn, Anthony Keeney, and Mike Rosenberg for assistance, and Jasjeet Sekhon for helpful discussion.

FISCAL CONSTRAINTS AND ELECTORAL MANIPULATION IN AMERICAN SOCIAL WELFARE

A merican social welfare policy involves a politically significant fiscal interaction between short-run, pay-as-you-go constraints and long-run equilibrium constraints motivated by the contributory principle and the concept of actuarial soundness. The fiscal constraints induce conflict between benefit recipients and payroll-tax-payers. To support small election-year reductions in payroll taxes, means-tested program benefits are slightly reduced in election years (compared to non-election-year levels under similar economic conditions). The existence of the constraints and of the election-year changes is tested using a multivariate time series regression model of monthly transfer payments and contributions for social insurance during years 1948-87. Short-run dynamics arefound to be weakly incrementalist, but otherwise the results support the argument. Extraordinary manipulations are identified during 1972. Special technical features of the econometric analysis are a nonlinear, dynamic specification; robust generalized method of moments estimation; and near cointegration.

Law and Data : The Butterfly Ballot Episode

Cornell University On televisions Law and Order, the police catch criminals and hand them over to the lawyers to get convictions. Part of the programs dramatic tension comes from the police operating under the scrutiny of a rigid and unforgiving legal system. The suspense increases as the lawyers try to do their job even though there is often a gap between justice and what the law requires. In Law and Data, data analysts track down the facts and prove their theories, but often have trouble explaining them simply and clearly. Lawyers find it hard to obtain, or even define, justice. And the law sometimes goes in odd directions, missing the biggest facts and emphasizing seemingly trivial ones. Justice is not always done. Our episode of Law and Data involves political scientists from Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, and the University of California, Berkeley, who came together through a series of accidents