Word: punches
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...clock on election night two weeks ago, and poll watchers in the small Georgia town of Dallas had a problem. The weather was humid and rainy. Now their vote-counting machine was rejecting thousands of punch-card ballots because the cardboard had warped in the damp night air. What to do? Break out the blow-dryers! "As weird as it sounds, it's standard procedure," says Fran Watson, election superintendent for Paulding County, where Dallas is located. "We blow a hair dryer over them, and then they'll go through...
...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...
...machines were the steam engines of democracy, weighty and expensive. It was at the peak of their popularity, in 1964, that nimble cardboard punch cards arrived, trailing instant prestige as descendants from the same tabulating process used by the computers of that day. They were also cheaper than the old machines, which meant localities could buy more of them to reduce long lines at polling places. By now the punch cards are the most common election device, used by 34% of voters, and the old machines have gone out of production...
...punch cards introduce their own problems. Holes that are incompletely punctured by the voter can baffle the counting machines. Those problems led Wisconsin to ban the cards in the 1990s, just as New Hampshire had done in 1986. In 1988, a report by the National Bureau of Standards, a federal agency, recommended that punch cards be abandoned everywhere. William Gardner, the New Hampshire secretary of state, recalls a test run in which just five cards were put through a counting machine three times--and produced three different counts. "It was not the most comforting feeling when...
...remembers saying. "I want to do a deal on the veto item." Barak wasn't playing. The next day the Prime Minister moved to cut the ground out from under Sharon, appearing on television to deny that he'd given Sharon a veto. And in a one-two punch, the Prime Minister blindsided Sharon by striking a deal with Shas...