Word: palming
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...votes affected were sufficient to change the statewide outcome, since the central issue is which candidate will be awarded Florida's electoral votes. One of those methods is a statistical analysis of the kind that has shown that Buchanan's total of 3,407 votes in heavily Democratic Palm Beach was far higher than his tally elsewhere in the state. If a court decides that the election is invalid, it would still be necessary to rule on whether a new vote is the only remedy. Florida courts, like courts in most other states, have been reluctant to order new elections...
Republicans also complained that samples of the ballot, which had been used before in Palm Beach without incident, had been published in the local paper and mailed to voters before the election. But Lillian Gaines, 67, a retired schoolteacher in West Palm Beach who is a plaintiff in one of the ballot lawsuits, says the sample did not show that the punch holes would not be aligned with the names. "This is what made it so confusing for people when they finally went into the booth," says her attorney, Harold Weiss...
...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...