CDR: Florida reject stats, chad vs. optical
George at Orwellian.Org
George at Orwellian.Org
Fri Nov 17 02:45:40 PST 2000
Dubya has announced he will nominate Harris
as ambassador to Chad.
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[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.
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