Word: punch
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...Elian Gonzalez. Now all the 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 Perez 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...
...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...
Frustration with the Palm Beach ballot had begun to go public even before the polls closed. At the Lucerne Point residence community, poll workers were so overwhelmed by complaints that they had to draw a diagram showing where each ticket's punch hole was located. Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach County election supervisor who had signed off on the ballot design, soon arranged for a flyer to be distributed at polling places around the county that would help voters decipher it. LePore, a Democrat, told reporters that day that she had favored the design partly because it permitted larger type...
...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...
When they looked closely as the recount was getting under way, Democrats noticed that in other counties with punch ballots, a disproportionate number had no votes 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...