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.

----

[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.





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list