Word: imperfection
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...made his reputation not by showboating on Geraldo but by reducing complex litigation to understandable stories, which he tells in his flat Midwestern tone. Boies likes the concrete. On Friday he introduced a developer of the Votamatic machine, William Rouverol, 83, to explain how his imperfect machine is more likely to produce dimpled chads in the vote for President than for other offices, because that column gets clogged by getting the most use and therefore harder to punch out cleanly as the day goes on. Boies took special delight in his statistician, a Yale professor resembling Professor Irwin Corey...
...pace of invention continues at the rate suggested by the preceding pages, the world will become a really boring place. The human species needs its daily grapplings with the illogical, the clunky, the imperfect if it is to preserve that which separates us from animals and household appliances. Man likes doing some things the hard way, the wrong way, the old-fashioned way. And too often, an invention that solves one superficial problem creates profound new others. Four new inventions in particular must be blocked at all costs if humanity as we know it is to survive...
...Ahmann was stuck now defending an imperfect machine, whose potential problems suddenly took center stage. After a few direct questions from Judge Sauls, Ahmann even acknowledged a particularly damning flaw: That a small light could show through on a ballot and the machine might not register a vote...
...voters deadlock, the law hands the outcome over to a game of chance: the candidates can flip a coin, draw a card from a deck or play a hand of poker--assuming they can agree. Florida law allows for drawing straws. But this tie is elusive, imperfect as the election that produced it because when you are shuffling through 6 million votes and double-punched ballots and hanging chads and missing postmarks and the whole archaeology of human frailty, every count by machine or by hand yields a different result, each so close as to be all but meaningless...
...should the future of free elections rest on the continuing popularity of big hair? The one heartwarming lesson from the Bush-Gore debacle is supposed to be that every vote counts. The less comforting lesson is that a lot of votes don't get counted. Thanks to the spectacularly imperfect voting methods in use around the U.S.--scribbled paper, antique voting machines and those finicky punch cards--hundreds of thousands of ballots are discarded each year. American political campaigns may be marvels of scientific polling and precision focus groups. Then comes Election Day and a piece of damp cardboard...