Overvotes and the pathetic underside of the disaster of 2000

Here:

A total of 46,000 uncounted overvotes unambiguously for Gore and 17,000 of them unambiguously for Bush.  If I understand this correctly, this means that Gore won the state not by a few hundred or a thousand votes, but by approximately 30,000 votes.  It wasn't even close.  (Of course, that is without accounting for the butterfly ballot or the African-American non-felons illegally purged from the voter list.)

Why did the overvotes overwhelmingly favor Gore?  Dehaven-Smith points out that they were overwhelmingly African Americans, and offers the following interpretation:

 

One of the things I found that hadn't been reported anywhere is, if you look at where those votes occurred, they were in predominantly black precincts. And (when you look at) the history of black voting in Florida, these are people that have been disenfranchised, intimidated. In the history of the early 20th century, black votes would be thrown out on technicalities, like they would use an X instead of a check mark.
So you can understand why African Americans would be so careful, checking off Gore's name on the list of candidates and also writing Gore's name in the space for write-in votes. But because of the way the vote-counting machines work, this had the opposite effect: the machines threw out their ballots.

This could be the most heartbreaking thing about Florida 2000: African-American voters, who were used to getting screwed out of their votes, took measures to be absolutely sure that their votes counted -- and as a result got screwed out of their votes.

But at least we can say to everyone: Not only did Gore win Florida and thus the election, but it wasn't even close.