On Friday, November 17, 2000, at 09:37 PM, jonathan@screaming.org wrote:

I just saw a report on CNN-or-some-such, that the Bush Camp was outraged that they'd seen some Techie "rifling the punchcard ballots" before feeding them into the machine!!!

How many of us here can harken back to the days of punchcards in computing? Did you not, routinely, rifle them prior to feeding them in to the reader, in order to dislodge the "chads"? WTF, I respectfully ask?

I can, barely, and, no, I didn't. But I get your point. The card punching machines I used did a good job of punching a clean hole. And I noticed on my Texas ballot just how cleanly the holes were punched. If there were many chads hanging about then either the punching equipment, the cards or both were faulty. Maybe the butterfly wasn't the only flaw in the design of the ballots.