Word: beachings
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...heart of the fight was those confusing Palm Beach ballots. Some 19,000 had been thrown out because voters had punched two holes for President; an additional 10,000 did not register any presidential choice. Hearing about the ballot's design problem, other voters in the county became convinced on Wednesday that they had accidentally voted for Buchanan, whose total of 3,407 votes in the county was three times as high as in neighboring counties with different-style ballots. Buchanan, never one to miss a chance to stir hot soup if it could spill on someone named Bush, went...
...Bush prevails, he will be the winner by a technicality--a badly designed ballot in Palm Beach County--and, perhaps, the first President in 112 years to gain office despite losing the popular vote. All his talk about gliding into Washington on the wings of a popular mandate--"a messenger of the people," as he once said--will be forgotten. If the Florida recount swings to Gore, he will have earned whisper-thin popular and electoral victories and the undying suspicion of millions of Bush supporters--people who absorbed the inaccurate Tuesday-night news reports that Bush...
Consider those goofy "butterfly ballots" in Palm Beach County. That was a mess, but not a plot. If you're going to rig the vote in a Democratic stronghold, you don't draw attention to the crime by shifting the tally to some right-wing drooler. Even Pat Buchanan was surprised to learn he had racked up votes in condominium precincts made up almost entirely of retired Jews. I suppose it's possible that they loved his position against free trade and have forgiven him for questioning the extent of the Nazis' responsibility for the Holocaust, but I doubt...
...what really happened in Palm Beach? The elections supervisor says she wanted to make the ballot easier for seniors to read. I believe her because it's a vintage South Florida bungle--a bureaucrat tries to do something nice for a few old folks and winds up paralyzing the nation...
That isn't to say there's no election chicanery in our fair state. The odds of honesty prevailing in all 67 counties are slim, especially with the stakes so high. While TV news crews from around the world are encamped at the Breakers in Palm Beach, who's watching little Okaloosa County in the Panhandle? Not to worry, though: Cuba's Foreign Minister has offered to send observers to ensure a fair counting of the ballots. And you know they would be impartial, because the Foreign Minister declared of Bush and Gore that...