Word: bracing
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...testimony of the vice president's first witness, political scientist Kimball Brace, was breathtakingly inept: The bedraggled wonk spent most of his time on the stand fumbling with 40-year-old voting machines and inadvertently shaking handfuls of chads onto Judge Sauls' desk. By the time Bush attorney Phil Beck had finished his cross examination, Brace had failed to support his theory that there might be structural problems or inconsistencies with the left-hand side of the Votomatic voting machine. He'd also all but admitted there was no reason to doubt the canvassing boards' ability to count their...
...this being a court of law, it's not likely that Sauls missed the sight of most of Brace's claims wilting under scrutiny. Gore needed a scientist up there, an engineer, not a witness who tried to dig himself out of holes with lines like "a small office called President of the United States" and how a hand count in Miami-Dade being "in accordance with the principles of the country." And not one (this was the very first witness; Gore had a statistician up next, and Bush has a current list of 20) that consumed...
...understand the principles of the country," Sauls drawled at Brace near the end. "Let's deal with the relevance to this case...
...During his cross-examination, Bush lawyer Beck peppered Hengartner with hypothetical questions relating to the left-hand side of the voting machine, apparently hoping to discredit Brace's testimony but serving primarily to underscore a serious miscalculation on the part of Gore's legal team - which would probably have been wise to have stuck with the Miami-Dade recount as the basis for their contest. Then, instead of wasting two witnesses trying to prove esoteric mechanical flaws of machines in Palm Beach, the Democrats might have scored a few points by insisting they were only trying to procure a first...
...chemical qualities of the rubber t-strip that's placed under the ballot in a Votomatic machine, testifying firmly there was no way the normal use of a stylus (the tool used to punch chads) could affect the composition of the underlying rubber. This was an attempt to discredit Brace, who'd claimed that overuse can cause the rubber to harden and make it more difficult for voters to punch through chads correctly...