below). These manual counts garnered Bush a net gain of 185 votes. Palm Beach County's butterfly ballots Many voters in Palm Beach County who intended to vote for Gore actually marked their ballots for Pat Buchanan or spoiled their ballots because they found the ballot's layout to be confusing. The ballot displayed the list of presidential running-mate pairs alternately across two adjacent pages, with a column of punch spaces down the middle. Bush's name appeared at the top of the ballot, sparing most Bush voters from error. About 19,000 ballots were spoiled because of overvotes (two votes in the same race), compared to 3000 in 1996. According to a 2001 study in the American Political Science Review, the voting errors caused by the butterfly ballot cost Gore the election: "Had PBC used a ballot format in the presidential race that did not lead to systematic biased voting errors, our findings suggest that, other things equal, Al Gore would have won a majority of the officially certified votes in Florida." On The Today Show of November 9, 2000, Buchanan said, "When I took one look at that ballot on Election Night ... it's very easy for me to see how someone could have voted for me in the belief they voted for Al Gore." Although Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said on November 9 that "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3,407 votes there", Buchanan's Florida coordinator, Jim McConnell, responded by calling that "nonsense", and Jim Cunningham, chairman of the executive committee of Palm Beach County's Reform Party, responded, "I don't think so. Not from where I'm sitting and what I'm looking at." Cunningham estimated the number of Buchanan supporters in Palm Beach County to be between 400 and 500. Asked how many votes he would guess Buchanan legitimately received in Palm Beach County, he said, "I think 1,000 would be generous. Do I believe that these people inadvertently cast their votes for Pat Buchanan? Yes, I do. We have to believe that based on the vote totals elsewhere." The ballot had been redesigned earlier that year by Theresa LePore (Supervisor of Elections and member of the Democratic Party). She said that she used both sides of the ballot in order to make the candidate names larger so the county's elderly residents could more easily see the names. Influential decisions Florida Supreme Court appeals