Microsoft® MapPoint® Example: Voting Machines in the Florida 2000 Election

This example application uses Microsoft MapPoint to analyze the Florida results of the 2000 US Presidential Election.

During the 2000 Presidential Election, the results for Florida came under close scrutiny and argument, with the final result being decided by the courts. Amongst the accusations was the charge that a lot of people in the county of Palm Beach were confused by the so-called 'Butterfly Ballot' (2 column Votomatic machine) and accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan when they intended to vote for Al Gore. Can MapPoint be used to refute this charge, or can it provide supporting evidence?

The data used for this demonstration was collated by Brett Presnell from the Dept. of Statistics, University of Florida; and is available from Carnegie Mellon's StatLib (Sample data sets) website. This dataset lists the final certified counts for each county as reported by the Florida Division of Elections for each county, excluding the Federal Absentee votes. Included in each county's record is the type of voting machine in use.

Initial Analysis of Votes for Minority Candidates

Here, the data has been imported into MapPoint and the votes have been plotted as column charts for each county. We are interested in the votes for Buchanan relative to the other minority candidates. Due to the large numbers of votes cast for Bush and Gore, we shall ignore these. But to account for different sized counties and different voter turnouts, we shall divide each candidate's result by the total number of votes cast for that county.

Straight away, we see that Palm Beach has an anomalously high count for Buchanan when compared to the surrounding counties. This map does not show which counties were using which voting system. Next, the voting technology is plotted as a Shaded Area plot for each county. This is displayed in the second map. The infamous 'Butterfly Ballot' (2 column Votomatic machine) is plotted in purple on the map. The only two counties that used this system were Palm Beach and Duval (Jacksonville area).

When compared with other counties in southern Florida, we see that Buchanan did get a relatively high proportion of votes at Palm Beach and that this was the only county using the 'Butterfly Ballot'. But when we look further north, we see that the only other county with the 'Butterfly Ballot' (Duval) has a low proportion of votes for Buchanan. Also, a number of counties in the Florida Panhandle have a lot of votes for Buchanan but none of them used the 'Butterfly Ballot'. So, at this stage the evidence does not appear to support the hypothesis that the 'Butterfly Ballot' was at fault, unless there are also other factors at play.

Political Leaning

Perhaps the political leaning of a county is a major factor? For example the high Buchanan votes in the Florida Panhandle could be due to that area naturally leaning to the right. Similarly, Duval might have relatively low numbers of people voting for Buchanan because few were trying to vote for Gore and making the mistake. Of course this means the county would also be leaning to the right and we would expect more people to intentionally vote for Buchanan.

We have the total votes cast for Bush and Gore in the same dataset, so we can divide one by the other to give a measure of how left-leaning or right-leaning a county is. We can then look for correlations between this and the Buchanan vote. We expect high Buchanan votes to correlate with Right-leaning counties and that any observed anomalies might be due to the voting machine being used.

This map colors the counties according to whether they had more votes for Bush (red) or Gore (blue). This is performed in MapPoint by dividing the Bush's count by Gore's: if the ratio is greater than one, then more people voted for Bush and the county is colored red.

As expected, the Panhandle counties tended to vote for Bush. It is reasonable to infer that these counties lean to the political right, hence explaining the higher votes for Buchanan. Indeed this can be seen across the entire State. Most of the counties that had high numbers of votes for Buchanan also voted for Bush rather than Gore. Those that voted for Bush but with low counts for Buchanan may have been more centrist and only leaned slightly to the right.

Palm Beach voted for Gore and is hence probably left leaning. It is unlikely that a left leaning county would have such a high number of votes for the right wing Buchanan.

Conclusions

The above is a simplified analysis. There are, of course, many other potential factors. However, it does demonstrate the relative ease that geographic hypotheses can be constructed and tested with MapPoint.

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