TALLY OF DADE COUNTY "UNDERVOTE" SUPPORTS BUSH WIN.(Brief Article)(Editorial)

Depending on where you live and how eager your local paper was to report results the editors may have found displeasing, you perhaps do not know that a study of the notorious "undervotes" in South Florida counties reveals that had they all been tallied George W. Bush likely would have won the presidency anyway. "Undervotes" were ballots which bore no "machine-readable vote" for president.

Results of the survey, sponsored by the Miami Herald and its parent company Knight Ridder, show that "Al Gore would have netted no more than 49 votes if a manual recount of Miami-Dade's ballots had been completed," according to the Herald.

If these 49 extra votes were added to gains Gore made in three other South Florida counties, Gore still would have fallen 140 votes short. And, with respect to the Miami-Dade ballots, Mr. Bush would actually have gained votes if the [in]famous "dimpled chad" ballots were not included, the Herald reports.

The Miami-Dade elections office identified some 10,644 ballots as undervotes. The review by the national public accounting firm, BDO Seidman, LLP, found that "1,555 bore some kind of marking that might be interpreted as a vote for Gore," according to the Herald. Likewise, 1,506 bore some kind of marking that might be interpreted as a vote for Mr. Bush. (Marking for other candidates added up to 106.)

These results fly in the face of repeated assertions that "had all the votes been counted," former Vice President Al Gore would be occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Some major papers, including the Washington Post, gave the results less than prominent play.

The Post's ombudsman, Michael Getler, devoted his March 4 column to reader complaints that the Post had "buried the story." Here is the response the Post's Executive Editor Len Downie gave Getler.

Downie sniffed that "the newspaper `would not even consider' putting on the front page a story on news media recount results in which The Post did not participate in the analysis of the data and wasn't intimately familiar with the criteria, standards, methods or interpretation of the ballot inspection." [Take that.]