Miami Herald recount: No flaws...or were there?!?

In an article published yesterday, reporters from the Miami Herald provided data from hand counts that they conducted in several northern "dixiecrat" counties in Florida. They concluded that nothing was awry, and in fact, went so far as to title the article "No flaw in Bush's state win."

Here's a link to a reprint of the story that doesn't require registration:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002102809_florida28.html

Below I take a closer look at the results of their recount and come to a very different conclusion.

Here are the tallies for Union County:

Bush original: 3396
Bush hand count: 3393 (-3)
Kerry original: 1251
Kerry hand count: 1272 (+21)
Net change: Kerry +24

Here are the tallies for Lafayette County:

Bush original: 2460
Bush hand count: 2452 (-8)
Kerry original: 845
Kerry hand count: 848 (+3)
Net change: Kerry +11

It's a bit more complicated for the third county they looked at, Suwanee County, because they didn't count all of the votes, stopping at "almost 60%." But here are the original tallies and the results of the hand count:

Bush original: 11153
Kerry original: 4522
Bush hand count: 6140
Kerry hand count: 2984

In the original count, 71.2% of the votes cast for Bush or Kerry (n=15675) went to Bush. In the hand count, this drops to 67.3%. That is a significant drop. Let's translate that into numbers. If you take the percentages from the hand count and extrapolate, here's what you get:

Bush = 15675 x .673 = 10549 (loss of 604)
Kerry = 15675 x .327 = 5126 (gain of 604)
Net change: Kerry +1208

[I know it's not legit to extrapolate like this since we don't know if the 60% is a random sample. This is just for arguments sake.] Obviously a switch of 1208 votes in a county with less than 16K votes cast would be huge. Now maybe there's a very large percentage of Bush votes in that remaining 40% that they didn't count, but we can't know that because they didn't count them. Which begs the question...why did they stop counting in Suwannee County when their tabulation of 60% of the ballots deviated from the original total? And more importantly, without actually counting those remaining ballots, how can they possibly report that nothing is amiss, when the data they do have is inconsistent with the certified vote tally?

Once again, they conclude that there's "no flaw in Bush's state win" and even use this as the title of the article. But one could reasonably argue, based on their data, that Kerry may have received over 1200 additional votes from the three small counties they examined. Moreover, the votes they counted represent about 0.3% of the ballots cast for Bush and Kerry statewide. If Kerry gained votes at the same rate across the state, he picks up about 400,000 votes and wins Florida.

Thanks Miami Herald, you just revealed to us that there's a possibility that Kerry won Florida.