IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v95y2001i04p793-810_40.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Butterfly Did It: The Aberrant Vote for Buchanan in Palm Beach County, Florida

Author

Listed:
  • Wand, Jonathan N.
  • Shotts, Kenneth W.
  • Sekhon, Jasjeet S.
  • Mebane, Walter R.
  • Herron, Michael C.
  • Brady, Henry E.

Abstract

We show that the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000 presidential election caused more than 2,000 Democratic voters to vote by mistake for Reform candidate Pat Buchanan, a number larger than George W. Bush's certified margin of victory in Florida. We use multiple methods and several kinds of data to rule out alternative explanations for the votes Buchanan received in Palm Beach County. Among 3,053 U.S. counties where Buchanan was on the ballot, Palm Beach County has the most anomalous excess of votes for him. In Palm Beach County, Buchanan's proportion of the vote on election-day ballots is four times larger than his proportion on absentee (nonbutterfly) ballots, but Buchanan's proportion does not differ significantly between election-day and absentee ballots in any other Florida county. Unlike other Reform candidates in Palm Beach County, Buchanan tended to receive election-day votes in Democratic precincts and from individuals who voted for the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate. Robust estimation of overdispersed binomial regression models undernins much of the analysis.

Suggested Citation

  • Wand, Jonathan N. & Shotts, Kenneth W. & Sekhon, Jasjeet S. & Mebane, Walter R. & Herron, Michael C. & Brady, Henry E., 2001. "The Butterfly Did It: The Aberrant Vote for Buchanan in Palm Beach County, Florida," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 95(4), pages 793-810, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:95:y:2001:i:04:p:793-810_40
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S000305540040002X/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cervellati, Matteo & Gulino, Giorgio & Roberti, Paolo, 2022. "Random Power to Parties and Policies in Coalition Governments," CEPR Discussion Papers 14906, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Fukumoto, Kentaro & Horiuchi, Yusaku, 2011. "Making Outsiders' Votes Count: Detecting Electoral Fraud through a Natural Experiment," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 105(3), pages 586-603, August.
    3. Matteo Cervellati & Giorgio Gulino & Paolo Roberti, 2024. "Random Votes to Parties and Policies in Coalition Governments," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 92(5), pages 1553-1588, September.
    4. Jason Wittenberg, 2013. "How similar are they? rethinking electoral congruence," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 47(3), pages 1687-1701, April.
    5. Scott Basinger & Damon Cann & Michael Ensley, 2012. "Voter response to congressional campaigns: new techniques for analyzing aggregate electoral behavior," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 150(3), pages 771-792, March.
    6. Antenangeli Leonardo & CantĂș Francisco, 2019. "Right on Time: An Electoral Audit for the Publication of Vote Results," Statistics, Politics and Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 10(2), pages 137-186, December.
    7. Walter R. Mebane & Jasjeet S. Sekhon, 2004. "Robust Estimation and Outlier Detection for Overdispersed Multinomial Models of Count Data," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 48(2), pages 392-411, April.
    8. Michael Munger, 2005. "Nineteenth-century voting procedures in a twenty-first century world," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 124(1), pages 115-133, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:95:y:2001:i:04:p:793-810_40. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/psr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.