After nine months of analyzing Florida presidental ballots,what was expected to be the biggest story of the year was lost beneath the rubble of Sept. 11

by Laura Parvey

After the Florida vote debacle in the 2000 presidential election, competing newspapers banded together in a consortium to study the disputed ballots. When the Sept. 11 attacks occurred however, the main problem for the consortium became when to publish the results and how to present the information without appearing to call into question the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s presidency.

But were the news media just talking to themselves? The p

ublication of the study’s results caused barely a ripple among citizens still focused on the aftermath of Sept. 11 and among those who fully supported Bush in his war efforts.

One consortium member told Inside.com after the attacks, “At some point, the press needs to decide when it is going back to its traditional role of questioning those in power. There is a sense right now, with the war effort just getting underway, that it is not the right time.”

Hendrick Hertzberg, writing in the last 2001 issue of The New Yorker, said, “It was the right time on Nov. 12, apparently; that was the day the news organizations got around to publishing the analysis of the results. But judging from the lack of discussion that has ensued, it abruptly became the wrong time on Nov. 13. Maybe it will never be the right time.”

But just because few cared about the Florida Ballot Project after Sept. 11 doesn’t mean the study wasn’t worth the money or effort.

Too close to call
Several events made the 2000 presidential election unique and “too close to call.” According to CNN.com, around 8 p.m. EST of election day, several television networks estimated Gore as the winner of Florida, but they were forced to recant this estimate when voting results came in from the Panhandle region.

By 2:15 a.m. of Nov. 8, 2000, major networks declared Bush the winner of Florida’s — electoral votes and thus of the election. Gore called Bush, conceded and prepared to give his concession address. But less than an hour later, he retracted his concession after hearing Bush led was only by a margin of less than half a percent, according to The Palm Beach Post.

Palm Beach County quickly became known as “ground zero” of the election because the county used a “butterfly ballot” and there was an unexpected number of votes for a third-party candidate, CNN.com reported. Votes were scrutinized in other counties and “chad” became known as more than a boy’s name around the country.

On Dec. 8, the Florida Supreme Court, 4-3, ordered manual recounts in all counties with significant numbers of presidential undervotes — ballots with no registered vote for president — but the next day the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the counts. On Dec. 12, the U.S. Supreme Court awarded Florida’s electoral votes to Bush, which officially ended the presidential race but not the controversy behind Florida’s ballots.

Members drop competitive spirit
Several newspapers wanted to look at the controversial ballots before the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the counting on Dec. 9, 2000. Local and national news media felt it was their duty to tell readers what happened in Florida.

“We have a responsibility to expose the flaws in the state’s election system and how they affected last year’s election. We’re doing so in hopes that these mistakes will not be repeated in the future. The very integrity of the state’s democratic process and the principle that every vote counts are good enough reasons to do this review,” Tim Franklin, editor of The Orlando Sentinel, told Bob Steele, senior faculty member and ethics group leader of the Poynter Institute.

The Miami Herald conducted an independent study with BDO Seidman LLP, a national accounting and consulting firm, and was the first to hop on the ballot inspection bandwagon. But the news consortium was also quick on its toes.

“The unprecedented decision to combine the forces of eight fiercely competitive organizations to review about 175,000 Florida ballots forced some of the biggest egos in U.S. journalism to drop years of healthy distrust and ban together,” reported Joel Engelhardt, a Palm Beach Post writer.

The reporter reasoned, “They did it for history. They did it for headlines. They did it to answer a question most found themselves asking at 2:39 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 9 when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount before it could reveal what the nation wanted to know: What information was hidden on those endlessly debated uncounted Florida ballots?”

They also joined forces so the heavy financial load wouldn’t be forced on one news organization. Although the project had initially been estimated to cost $500,000, the cost rose to $900,000.

The participating groups included the Washington Post Co. (including its magazine Newsweek), The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, CNN, Tribune Publishing (including the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the Los Angeles Times and South Florida Sun-Sentinel), The Palm Beach Post and The St. Petersburg Times. The consortium hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and finalized the relationship on Jan. 9, 2001.

Publishing the results
The Miami Herald pushed for publication of its review of under votes in April and followed through with its goal. Unlike the Herald, the consortium didn’t set an immediate deadline for publication because it didn’t want to rush the research center’s extensive process.

The NORC examined both the undervotes and overvotes, ballots with more than one vote for president. The center didn’t analyze the data. The final calculations fell on the shoulders of the newspapers, said Julie Antelman of the NORC. The center’s goal was not to declare a winner, but to assess the reliability of the voting systems themselves.

The NORC’s review began on Feb. 5, 2001 and concluded on May 29. The news consortium set its first potential publication date as June 30, but the information wasn’t ready. The consortium then set its publishing date for Sept. 16, but computer malfunctions pushed the publishing date to Sept. 24.

When all hell broke loose on Sept. 11, the news consortium told the NORC to hold the data until further notice.

The complexities of Sept. 11
After Sept.11, there was little coverage about the consortium holding off on the release of the information. But some news organizations hit the consortium hard with criticism. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “to deliberately not report major news is a remarkable decision for them to take. But they say the decision was taken because of a lack of resources and that the war on terrorism made the story irrelevant.”

While consortium members felt the information wasn’t irrelevant, they felt it didn’t need immediate attention.

“There was no immediate need for citizens to know the information. The value was long-term,” Steele wrote in an e-mail interview. “To release the information right after Sept. 11 would have been problematic for several reasons. The story would have been overwhelmed by coverage of the terrorism and the backlash from the public would have been much stronger, therefore minimizing the impact of the project.”

As the weeks passed, the Associated Press pushed for publication and in October, Nov. 12 was set for the release date.

Bad timing
The consortium continued to reject claims made by other news organizations that they weren’t releasing the results to protect the Bush administration. But, they knew every move they made regarding the project would be scrutinized because the election was wrapped in conspiracy theories. Because of this, when the final date was set the news organizations had another challenge facing them: how to report the information with the least amount of impending criticism possible.

Steele described it as an ethical “Catch-22” — the “benefits of the truth” versus “harm to society.” Journalism can serve democracy or be counterproductive to societal interests, said Steele in an article published on the Poynter Institute Web site.

“In a democracy, citizens function best when they have as much information as possible, including information that may anger, repulse, frustrate as well as information that inspires, thrills and pleases,” Steele wrote.

Manning Pynn, public editor for The Orlando Sentinel, told Steele, ”The primary journalistic issue apart from a commitment to resolve all the unanswered questions is how to present the information. It’s a volatile issue likely to upset a lot of readers both for its content and for our appearing, by examining a year-old election, to question the legitimacy of the sitting president. That, of course, isn’t what we are doing but that’s what many of our readers perceive us to be doing.”

Franklin also expressed concern about the timing of the report, but realized the main point — to discover the election process inaccuracies — hadn’t changed.

“Is it more patriotic to withhold the ballot review because of the terrorist attacks? Or, is it more patriotic to explain how a state’s election system disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters? I guess we’ll leave it for the readers to decide ... Sure, we may have a reader uprising on our hands. All we can do is try to clearly articulate our rationale to our readers. My hope is that they’ll understand the public purpose of this project. If they don’t, it may be time to break out the bullet-proof vest,” Franklin commented.

Steele offered tips to the media consortium in an article posted on www.poynter.org. News organizations must make sure they explain the purpose of the project and the methodology behind the assessment. They must bring the proper tone to the stories with headlines, info-graphics, word choice and photos. They must focus on the election process not the winner-loser equation and give the story appropriate weight and play in the paper and newscasts.

Not all members of the consortium took Steele’s advice. According to an article by Dan Fisher, an MSNBC ombudsman, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press focused their reports on how the additional votes would have affected the elections outcome in four different scenarios. They focused on the winner-loser equation.

The St. Petersburg Times made adjustments to its plans on how to release the information after the attacks, publishing the report in its own section so that readers could “study the material as their time and interest allow, so they could come to their own conclusions about the election,” reporter Paul Tash wrote. But the newspaper still heard negative feedback from its readers saying it was time to move on and support the president.

The Orlando Sentinel reported that even Gore said it was time for the country to move forward. “We are a nation of laws, and the presidential election of 2000 is over. Right now our country faces a great challenge as we seek to successfully combat terrorism.”

The Florida Ballot Project ended quietly with many people stating there was no relevance to a story about a year-old election, but consortium members still defended the project.

“Journalism is sometimes described as history in a hurry. Clearly this project did not happen quickly, but it does help illuminate an important chapter in American political history. Simply put, that is part of our job,” Tash wrote in the St. Petersburg Times.

Ten months and more than $900,000 later, the news consortium had finished its duty to serve democracy. The consortium provided its readers with information they needed to be free and self-governing. While many question the relevancy of the study, there is now a database of more than 180,000 Florida ballots for historians’ use.

“We shouldn’t assume it’s gone forever just because nobody cares about it now,” The Washington Post quoted CNN analysist Jeff Greenfield. “This was after all how the president of the United States was picked.”

Many consortium members sighed with relief after the publication. But just because the review had been completed, it didn’t put an end to the conspiracy theories surrounding the election. The debate about who Americans cast their votes for in Florida has been silenced, but it isn’t over.

Sept. 11 “extinguished the last traces of any appetite for a discussion that might call into question the legitimacy of the president, who has his hands full and who needs, and has, the support of a nation united in the struggle against terror,” Hertzberg wrote in The New Yorker. “The damage to democracy has already been done ... An unhappy legacy of the election of 2000 is that that day now seems more distant than ever.”