Word: punch-card
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...yielded higher test scores. And many voters have begun to move beyond the recount, not only because most of the Miami Herald's recent analysis confirmed W.'s victory, but also because Jeb this month delivered on his promise of electoral reform. Starting next year, Florida will replace the punch-card and butterfly ballots with statewide optical scanning...
...public office. Finally, the presidential campaign that everyone thought was boring suddenly became all too interesting. The election ran aground in Florida, its outcome simply too close to call, a digital-photo-finish that defeated the state's analog voting equipment (and meanwhile added a 1950s term, punch-card "chad," to our lexicon). The cable-TV pundits made their dependable racket and protesters filled the South Florida streets, but as the votes were recounted and Gore contested Bush's apparent victory, the public remained admirably patient--content to let this truly important episode play out. Our frivolous, sometimes hysterical...
...punch cards (think Palm Beach and Votomatics); 15 percent use '50s-era lever machines (flip the switches and pull the lever); 12 percent use paper ballots (drop them in a box or mail them in); 9 percent use electronic touch-screens; 2 percent use Data Vote, which is punch-card voting without the Votomatics...
...like whether old chads build up behind ballots and sometimes prevent a hole from being fully punched. Gore won a victory on that point, but Bush lawyer Phil Beck expertly cross-examined the Gore team's statistician, Yale professor Nicolas Hengartner. The professor had to admit that he had in fact never inspected a certain ballot that he claimed to have examined in his affidavit. The embarrassing admission didn't change Hengartner's overall point that there were serious problems with punch-card voting, but it may have damaged his credibility with Sauls...
...most of the undervotes come from Gore-majority areas? Basically, yes. Of the 42,000 undervotes yet to be examined, more than 35,000 come from the 25 punch-card counties. Punch-card machines are less reliable than the pricier voting technology used in more Republican areas. Brevard County, for instance, which went 53 percent to 45 percent for Bush, uses optical scanners. "There are no dimples, crimples, pimples or anything else to interpret," says election supervisor Fred Galey. That's good for him but - if the hand count resumes - bad for Bush, since Brevard's 277 undervoted ballots probably...