More Money Would Have Helped

The polling organization responsible for prompting several news organizations to make premature or incorrect calls in the presidential election reportedly believes that a series of errors, miscalculations and "bad luck" distorted the crucial Florida vote.

That's according to the Washington Post, which quotes an internal report by Voter News Service as saying that its techniques in Florida were risky for the news organizations that relied on its data.

VNS is a polling consortium funded by ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and The Associated Press. Created in 1990, it provides polling information to the news organizations, which interpret the data independently.

CBS News Correspondent Lou Miliano reports the information obtained by the Post suggests VNS investigators believe a bigger budget to cover the presidential election might have made a difference in the reliability of the statistics.

On election night Nov. 7, all six VNS members initially projected that Vice President Al Gore had won Florida, a key to winning the presidency. The news organizations later said Florida was "too close to call," but early on Nov. 8, five VNS members declared Bush the winner in Florida and nationwide.

The AP was the only one of the six not to declare Bush the winner on Nov. 8.

In a confidential account reported by the Post, VNS said it had no reliable way of estimating the number of Florida's absentee ballots, which were almost double what it had expected. VNS also underestimated the number of Florida votes still uncounted at 2 a.m., the report said.

Budget limitations "placed heavy burdens on all VNS staff and (have) made the task of covering elections far more difficult than necessary," the report said.

VNS spokeswoman Lee C. Shapiro declined to comment on the inquiry.

According to the report, VNS projected that absentee ballots would make up 7.2 percent of the overall vote - they actually accounted for 12 percent. VNS also projected that absentees would vote 22.4 percent more for Bush than Election Day voters, when the actual figure was 23.7 percent.

VNS did no telephone polling in Florida to try to estimate the size and character of the absentee vote, largely because of "the very considerable costs" involved, the report said.

Gore's lead also was inflated by problems with the sampling of voters in 45 selected precincts, and by flaws in the exit poll "model" itself, which inflated Gore's lead early on by as much as 16 points, the report said.

Network projections that Bush had won Florida, and with it the presidency, began at 2:16 a.m. They also were based on bad VNS numbers, although neither the news service nor the AP declared Bush the winner.

At 2:10 a.m., with 97 percent of the state's precincts reporting, VNS estimated that there were 179,713 votes outstanding. In fact, more than 359,000 votes came later.

Among other problems cited, VNS' quality-control system aparently failed to reject an early report that 95 percent of Duval County had voted for Gore.

Also, inadequate exit-poll samples may have overstated the size of Florida's black and Cuban vote, the report said.

While some "bad luck" was involved, editorial director Murray Edelman said in the report that the networks also bear responsibility for making projections without consulting VNS.

Since the election, several networks have said they would no longer project winners in states until all polls are closed. Several have also said they would consider canceling their VNS contracts.

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