Word: punch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...frustrations of one of the closest elections in American history have made a landing on Palm Beach. Florida is the center of a struggle over the operations of American democracy at every level, from the wisdom of the electoral college to the arrangement of punch holes on a paper ballot. Fidel Castro's foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, even suggested last week that a new election in Florida would be a good idea. Maybe they could send election monitors from Cuba to ensure the fairness of the vote count. It would all be funny if the laughs didn...
...parties had been saying for weeks that the presidential campaign would all come down to Florida. Neither of them suspected how much of it would come down to Palm Beach County. Or to the experience of people like Andre Fladell, 52, a Jewish chiropractor. At around 7 a.m., he punched his ballot at Orchard Elementary School in Delray Beach. On the way out, when he heard people complain that the ballot had confused them, he assumed they had not paid enough attention. But at lunch later with friends, Fladell says, he broke into a cold sweat when he heard them...
...Ahem: terrible calamity, anyone? For reasons the networks say they have yet to clear up, far more votes than expected quickly came in, including a flood for Gore that closed the gap at one point to around 200 votes. By 4 a.m., punch-drunk anchors reversed themselves a second humiliating time. (In fact, the networks were shown up by new technology: Gore retracted after aides noticed the narrower margin on the Web.) Says Fox News vice president John Moody, "The call of Florida for Gore was not a mistake, it was a miscalculation" - a matter of incorrect data. "The call...
...That is because those ballots frighten the Bush camp. On the confusing "punch card" ballots, some voters did not punch through the hole and left a little paper flap hanging. A machine may not recognize this punch as a vote, but a human being might, which is what the Democrats are hoping. They could pick up a thousand votes or two this way; the first may have already given them an extra 1,457. On Saturday morning, Baker announced that the Bush campaign had gone to federal court to block any manual recount...
...When they looked closely as the recount was getting under way, Democrats noticed that in other counties with punch ballots, a disproportionate number had nobody voting for President. In Broward alone, which gave Gore 68% of its vote, there were 6,686 ballots that did not register a presidential vote. In Pinellas, election authorities figured out this problem and began removing the little hanging flap from the punch cards, although they didn't catch all the faulty ballots before the full recount was completed. Nonetheless, Gore picked up 417 votes there, and now it became important for Democrats to press...