I was in cook county and i know i punched twice on some of the judges up for relection. I told the judge and was told those are the breaks, nothing can be done. He took the ballot, double punches and all, and stuffed it in the box.
That ballot style was heinous. Since it was in a fixed position in a fairly high booth, It was at an angle that made the punches look like they fell between the two holes. THe booths also had built in flourescent lights that made a terrible glare on the ballot. It took me about 4 times longer to vote and usually I have more stuff to vote on than that.
http://madison.hss.cmu.edu/ clearly shows that something was wrong with the votes there. If we let this election stand in that county then we compromise our democracy and disenfranchise thousands of voters.
It is my opinion, that if a revote should occur, that the only reasonable and fair way to do it would be to revote in the entire country.
If only the counties in question were revoted, there would be too much chance of fraud. Also, those counties would be the ones that would be most likely to vote for Gore.
I don’t believe everything I read. That’s why I questioned it, obviously. The reason I didn’t catch it as a joke is because it’s exactly the sort of accusation that could be flying around at this point, given all the very strange tactics employed by both sides (like the Republican groups’ “vote Nader” ads, and “we’ll make Nader have accepted soft money, even if he really didn’t and we’re just being assholes”. Compared to all them (and the fact that a dead guy won a senate seat), that didn’t seem out of line, at least for a rumor.
I just realized that I should probably clarify what I mean.
What I meant to say is: In a democratic society (okay, actually a republic, but same difference) everyone’s opinion should hold weight, even those that are wrong. Therefore, no one is too stupid to vote. To say that is extremely elitist.
The best sign I’ve seen somebody holding down in Florida: “If you can read this, you must be Republican.”
LMAO!
Also, for those Gore campaign people who were giving the homeless in Milwaukee cigarettes in exchange for their absentee votes for Gore - what do you have to offer a guy who owns his own home and quit smoking?
To me, it’s fairly obvious voter fraud was going through the country like a “big wheel through a cotton field” (and was anyone else almost fatally annoyed by Dan Rather’s constant stream of fucked-up metaphors and witticisms Tuesday night?) Here in Missouri, Kit Bond is frothing at the mouth about voter fraud. In today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, it was mentioned that police found a voting machine discarded in an empty lot on Olive Blvd. Now where the hell did that come from? As far as the whole Florida snafu goes, I agree that since the ballots in question had been in use before, and they were approved and advertised in advance of the election, that should be the end of it. The Dems are crying now because they know there’s still a lot of absentee ballots yet to come in, mostly military, which means mostly Republican. The rules are in place for a reason, and from what I’ve been able to tell from the confused and fuzzy reports floating around, a whole shitload of them got broken Tuesday.
“How long does it take Florida to count its votes”.
I was listening to the radio this morning and this was the topic of a local call-in talk show. Three of the five callers I listened to couldn’t understand why the electoral votes were taken away from Gore. They thought that the popular vote decided who the president was. These idiots thought that because it was on TV that the election was already over. When asked why did you vote for Bush/Gore none of them could answer, they did not know why they voted for the candidate they voted for.
If you want to complain about the electoral process, if you don’t care enough about your vote to read the ballot carefully, or ask for instructions if you don’t understand it, if you don’t know what the electoral college is, if you don’t why you voted for your candidate, if you can’t pass the same test we give to immigrants, you should not be allowed to vote. You are why the electoral college exists!
If this sounds like you then go back to watching the cartoon network CNN is not for you!
I just saw an item on the news where the “confusing” Florida ballot was given to a class of seven-year-olds and they were told to show where to vote for Gore. They all got it right.
well, it certainly wasn’t shown by putting it on one of the voting booths, 7 year olds are not tall enough. I was just barely and coupled with the fixed angle and glare, it was confusing
I’m not a rabid Gore supporter, and much less a Bush supporter. To me, the Florida ballot took a double take to see which way to punch. In line with Karl Gauss and Veb, I think that one should have sympathy with the elderly voters, who comprise a large portion of that county.
It’s now obvious that the ballot had problems. In hindsight, the solution would have been to offer some guidance to those who might be confused by it.
For those who can’t understand why some of those voters are making a big deal of it all, I’ll wager that many elderly voters were not so much voting for Gore, but for Lieberman, the first Jewish Vice-Presidential candidate. That’s important to a constituency who have lived through the Holocaust; people who have lost family members and have suffered through the worst of times. To then have your vote count for Pat Buchanan, with his track record of callous anti-semitic statements, would be a painful affront.
They should speak up. That’s what Democracy is all about. If Bush wins truly, with all voices heard, so be it. But if the Republican camp doesn’t want to delineate the finer points of this wire, they’re sorely lacking in popular finesse.
Since this is the Pit, I (don’t) hope that folks who are calling some stupid reach a ripe old age and totter up to whatever poll system we have in 30 years, only to be stymied by something that seems obvious, but may not jibe well with your antiquated self. “Jeez, Gramps, you just plug your chip into the booth. Duuuhhh.”
I think lee has a good point here. The photos I’ve seen of the ballot in question (referred to by yojimbo and MysterEcks, above) show the ballot from straight above. What you don’t realize from the 2D photo is that the punchcard ballot is below the printed butterfly sheet.
When I used such a ballot (like eight years ago, for example), the height difference from the card to the printed sheet was like 1/4" to 3/8". Not much, but as lee points out, the booth is fairly high, and the ballot is basically horizontal. If you stand in a normal position, the resulting parallax makes the printed arrows look closer to, or exactly in line with, the punch above.
This effect is, of course, worse for shorter people, and worse for the names at the top of the ballot (like the Presidential race). I’m 5’9", and I had to stand on my tip-toes and lean far into the booth to make sure I was punching the correct hole, because if I stood in a normal position I couldn’t tell which hole wnt to which name.
Now, I made sure I punched the correct hole for everyone I voted for (I double-checked), and perhaps that’s the issue here. However, if you maintain that anyone who mispunches such a ballot is stupid, it just ain’t so.