Recounts From Undervotes

Abstract

The vote recount in the 2000 Presidential election (Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties, Florida) is examined for evidence of bias. A precinct-level dataset is constructed, incorporating the machine-vote tally, the recount vote tally, voter registration demographics, and the ballot review by media sources. A new multivariate beta-logit model is introduced that allows joint modeling of multivariate unobserved latent probabilities. A simple two-step estimator is proposed that approximates the joint maximum likelihood estimator. The estimates are consistent with a strong hypothesis: that the recount vote tally was unbiased. Specifically, it is found that the precinct-level machine-vote probability for a candidate is an unbiased predictor for the hand-recount undervote probability. There is no evidence of bias in the recount.