In late 2000, a consortium of the largest news organizations in the United States selected NORC to provide the definitive picture of the Florida vote count in the disputed presidential election of November 2000. The consortium chose NORC for this work because of its long-standing reputation for nonpartisan, objective, and analytically rigorous data collection and analysis. Kirk Wolter, NORC Senior Fellow and Director of its Center for Excellence in Survey Research, directed NORC's effort on the project.
General Project Information
Approximately 180,000 ballots in Florida’s 67 counties were uncertified because they failed to register a “valid” vote for President. These ballots included those in which no vote was recorded (undervotes) and those in which people voted for more than one candidate (overvotes). NORC examined the undervotes and overvotes.
The goal of the project was not to declare a “winner,” but rather to carefully examine the ballots to assess the relative reliability of the three major types of ballot systems used in Florida. The results of this assessment helped state legislatures, other decision-makers, and developers of ballot systems to work toward more reliable ballot systems. The data archive containing the results of NORC’s work is available on this site for use by news organizations, and by the public.
Project Sponsors
The consortium of news organizations that sponsored the NORC Florida ballot project is made up of:
The New York Times owns The Boston Globe, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and the Lakeland Ledger among others. Washington Post Co. owns The Washington Post and Newsweek. Tribune, based in Chicago, owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, among others.
The consortium joined together to retain NORC, because they wanted a comprehensive in-depth inventory of all uncounted votes in Florida’s November 2000 Presidential race that would be immune from charges of political bias or methodological weakness. Consortium members had access to the raw data for a brief period before public release of the database, from which they developed their own analyses and stories about what the uncounted ballots reveal.
Project Mission
Methodology
Ballot Types
Data Files
Resources
Publications
Wolter, K., Jergovic, D., Moore, W., Murphy, J. and O'Muirheartaigh, C. 2003. "Reliability of the Uncertified Ballots in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida." The American Statistician, 57(1):1-14.