Dubya has announced he will nominate Harris as ambassador to Chad. ---- [snipped] http://foxnews.com/election_night/111600/uncounted.sml # # TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Not every vote counts. # # George W. Bush and Al Gore are just 300 votes apart in Florida's # presidential election, but more than 180,000 Floridians who went # to the polls on Nov. 7 could have just stayed home. Their ballots # were tossed out because they chose more than one presidential # candidate, didn't choose one at all or their vote didn't register. # # That's nearly 3 percent of the 6,138,567 ballots that Florida # citizens turned in. Experts say the national average usually # runs at less than 2 percent, depending on the type of voting # method used. # # The problem in Florida largely can be traced to paper punchcard # ballots, which have helped derail the presidential election and # added "chad" to the national lexicon. # # Some counties had startlingly large numbers of ballots that # weren't counted. All three of these used punchcards: # # - In Miami-Dade County, 28,601 ballots were not counted in the # presidential race, out of about 654,044 cast. # # - In Palm Beach County, home of the controversial "butterfly # ballot," 29,702 votes weren't counted out of 462,888 total. # # - In Jacksonville and surrounding Duval County, 26,909 votes # went uncounted out of 291,545 cast. # # Election lawyer Kenneth Gross, who worked for Bob Dole's 1996 # presidential campaign, said the problem is that holes on the # cards aren't always clean. # # "If there's any paper hanging, the machine tends to push it back # into the hole and then records it as a no vote," Gross said. # # Leon County, where the state capital, Tallahassee, is located, # was another story altogether. There were only 181 votes that # weren't counted, just 0.2 percent of the total. # # That's largely because Leon and 14 other Florida counties use # an optical scan system in which voters fill in a bubble with # a pen instead of punching a hole in a card.