I stand corrected.
And a fair amount of the controversy was over the hand counting, and whether things like hanging chads or dimpled chads should be counted.
When I was active in the Libertarian party DesertWife and I were observers for the count at the registrar’s office. In Santa Clara county the exact same Votomatic system that was used as in Palm Beach county, Fla. The ballots were laid out differently so all of the candidates’ names were on the left-hand page, not butterflied like that gawdawful pic in post 1182 above.
I would wander around in the warehouse watching the ballots being prepared to be run through the counting machines. Each precinct had the ballots in a sealed and signed box which would be put on a table with two temp workers after being verified by the registrar. The box would be opened and the ballots, typically a deck about two-inches thick, would be split between the two workers who would hold their share in ine hand and riff through the open end looking for any oddities like the infamous hanging chad.
The rule was one corner broken loose or two corners diagonally opposite, leave it alone. If two loose corners were on the same side or end, they’d use a strawberry huller modified by having the end ground so it was pointier to pluck the chad off. They would then hold the opposite side and riff through the other end before swapping with their partner and riffing both ends on the other half of the pack. Along with a header card, the ballots would be put in a standard IBM card tray and when that was more or less full, it would be transported to the counting room where DW and a representatives from the Democrat and Republican parties would watch them being run through the counting machines.
The Green party could have had observers as well but never sent anyone and I was the only one out in the warehouse. Once in a great while the workers would find a ballot that had been inserted backards at the poll. They were designed so the pre-punched spots would not line up with the holes the stylus would be pushed through. Usually this led to a series of dimples on the ballot which would be ironed flat. Occasionally the voter was persistent and pushed hard enough to actually punch through in which case a blank ballot would be substituted. Either way the ballot would be counted with the ultimate under-vote possible.
I am okay with machine-counted ballots but also advocate the paper trail. When I was a teen living in Pennsylvania I remember a big scandal where the voting machines in Philadelphia, the kind where you step inside and turn levers, had only an odometer-type counter for the votes. It was discovered that some of them were not zeroed out when delivered to the polls but had fake zeroes pasted over the real numbers that would get scraped off as the wheels turned.
I remember something very different about the 2000 Bush-Gore election in Florida. Hanging chads had nothing really to do with it. That came later…
Two factors threw the election to Bush in Florida: Ralph Nader and the clusterfuck that was the Palm Beach County butterfly ballot. If either had not been a factor, Gore would have won.
The clusterfuck in Palm Beach County had nothing to do with hanging chads in particular (although there may be been those too). The problem with the layout of the butterfly ballot, and the mechanical machines the voters had to stick the ballots into.
If the voter card was not inserted fully and seated properly in the machine, then the little arrows pointing from the candidates names to the punch buttons didn’t line up properly. The effect of this was that many voters who thought they were voting for Gore accidentally voted for Buchanan by mistake.
As I recall, there were more votes for Buchanan in Palm Beach County than there were registered voters for the Reform Party in the county. Buchanan himself acknowledged that his vote count was implausibly high.
The problem, of course, is that there was no way to “correct” that. The votes for Buchanan were votes for Buchanan, and there was no way to detect any that were unintentional. This had nothing to do with hanging chads. No amount of recounting could have corrected this.
Gore’s camp, grasping at straws in desperation, demanded recounts. This led to state-wide recounting, and that’s when hanging chads became an issue, and that’s all the news media could talk about after that.
But note that the mis-votes for Buchanan were a systematic error. Every erroneous vote went the same way, and there was no way to detect them. In contrast, the hanging chads were a random error. Any vote for any candidate could have left a hanging chad. In recounting, a vote for Bush could have been changed to a vote for Gore, or equally well, the opposite.
Over the large number of ballots being recounted, the “law of averages” suggests that the votes switched from Gore to Bush would have approximately equaled the votes switched from Bush to Gore, so that the final vote counts would not have changed very much. Thus, correcting all the hanging chad votes was never very likely to change the final outcome.
The Supreme Court, by sticking their asses in where they had no business and canceling the recounts, guaranteed that we will never know.
But the fuck-up in Palm Beach County (and Ralph Nader) threw the election to Bush, and no amount of recounting could have fixed that.
They must have been in a hurry then because the ones I was familiar with had two large, red pins that held the ballot in place with the proper registration. Like I mentioned, the error I saw was inserting ballot backwards despite the fact it was plain white while the proper side had the instructions and arrows on how to insert it into the punching jig.
I’m not sure how that would work. A hanging chad may block the hole that it should have been removed from, which would reduce the vote for one of the candidates. On going through the card reader, the chad might be removed, so if they run them through again, that candidate gets a higher count. However, I don’t see how this could switch a vote from one to another.
Another, less likely, but still potential problem is if a voter mistakenly voted for two people for the same office. Normally, this would be rejected as an invalid vote. If one of those had a hanging chad, it could be counted as a vote for one candidate, but on recount with the chad gone, would then be invalid. In combination with the first kind of problem on a different ballot, this may give the illusion of hanging chads switching a vote, but it isn’t. And this kind of error should be fairly rare, since people usually don’t vote for two people for the same office.
At any rate, one of the good things about that election is that most elections offices moved away from the punch card ballots. We did have them here in my county at that time. And that was with all-vote-by-mail. Yes, they actually mailed out those cards and gave instructions on how to vote them. It was far from the easiest way to vote, and I expect lots of people made mistakes doing it. By 2002, they’d gotten rid of them and went to paper ballots.
I always thought that a half punched hole, or even a dimple on an other wise pristine card should have counted , if the dimple was directly over the…thing that gets punched. That should have signaled intent, even if it made more work for vote counters.
Okay, okay, okay, @dtilque , I worded that wrong, and you’ve correctly described what I meant to write. Hanging chads, or “dimples” or whatever might not have been counted at all, and when correctly re-counted, could have increased the vote for one candidate or another. It’s still a random error, meaning each instance is equally likely to have affected one candidate as another. And thus, the increases in the votes for each candidate would be likely to be roughly equal. This is still unlikely to have changed any outcomes.
I’m not sure I agree. If you’re in a heavy Gore area, where he’s expected to get 70% of the vote, losing 5% of those votes will mean more than Bush losing 5% of of the votes he got.
I considered that. Note that the total votes in all of Florida for Bush and Gore were quite close – I think about just 500+ votes apart. (I think that number was in Palm Beach County alone.) If the total statewide votes hadn’t been similarly close, then the results in Palm Beach alone would never have been such a cliffhanger. So I guesstimate that the recounts would have increased (note: not decreased) the Bush and Gore votes in roughly similar numbers.
ETA: Note also, even if the vote split had been large (like 70% to 30% or whatever), then the re-counts would have increased both their votes roughly in proportion to the votes they already have, and so it still would not be expected to change the outcome.
But what if I changed my mind and decided to not vote for any candidate in that particular office? The more likely scenario is a failure to push hard enough, but the other can’t be discounted.
If you’ve already made any kind of mark on your ballot (even just a cute little dimple) and then change your mind, the voter should give the ballot back to the election worker and ask for a new one.
If the issues only occured in one county, and that county was significantly different from the state average, then it very well could.
I’m not sure if that butterfly ballot was used across the state, though. If that style of ballot (and the attendant problem with hanging chads) was used in precincts with strong support for Gore, and a less error prone type was used in areas that supported Bush, it could have made a difference.
You’ve mis-read the situation entirely. The butterfly ballot was not used across the state. It was only used in Palm Beach County (or, if a similar ballot system was used elsewhere, it was not fucked up like it was in PBC.) Hanging chads were not a problem specific to the butterfly ballot, and hanging chads were apparently a problem with the state-wide counts.
ETA:
You’re in Florida, aint’cha? How do you remember the situation? As I remember it (from my safely distant perch in California), the PBC vote was very close, with only about 500 votes difference between Bush and Gore (or was that the difference statewide?) And I am assuming the statewide vote must have been very close, or else the close race in PBC would not have raised such a brouhaha. And what happened in PBC was that more votes, apparently intended for Gore, accidentally went to third-party candidate Buchanan, enough to toss the election to Bush in PCB and enough to toss the election to Bush in the whole state.
Actually, we do know. A media consortium did an unofficial recount. They found that continuing the official recount would not have changed the outcome.
And SCOTUS got involved because they had to slap down the Florida Supreme Court, which genuinely had no business getting involved.
When the Florida recount was stopped, Bush won the state by a margin of 537 votes. That is state-wide. But that was the final margin. At first, Bush was ahead by 1,784 votes (the night of the election, November 7) which was close enough to trigger a recount. After the machine recount was concluded a few days later (November 10), the lead was cut to 327 votes. The Gore campaign demanded a manual recount in 4 counties; Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia Counties. That recount started November 12, and by state law had to be done by November 14. However, it was clear that the recount was not going to be finished on time, and both the Gore campaign and two of the counties (Volusia and Palm Beach) sued to extend the deadline.
Of course, the Bush campaign pushed to have the recount stopped, arguing that a recount of only 4 counties was unconstitutional (citing the 14th Amendment) and that since there were no statutory standards for hand recounts, there was no objective way to tabulate the punched ballots.
By the 14th, Bush was ahead by 300 votes in the recounts. The counts continued sporadically with legal challenges flying all over the place. Just reading the details is a headache. The ultimate count with a 537 margin going to Bush was declared on November 26, as the recount was again suspended. It wasn’t until December 12 that the US Supreme Court put a final stop to all of it, and the Gore campaign conceded the next day. (That seems so quaint these days.)
It was a bad time for election confidence. There were so many irregularities. By comparison, despite the brouhaha the most recent presidential election was as smooth as you could hope for. Maybe the country really does learn its lesson every once in a while.
Yes, I’ve noticed that Republicans have no interest in relitigating the 2000 election, probably because their guy won.
The brouhaha surrounding the 2020 election is entirely Trump and his enablers lying about the fact that he lost, and by a lot. And they’re still talking about it, and we’re practically halfway into Biden’s term.
No probably about it.
“Bush won, get over it.” 
Any chance we can get back to the Lindell craziness? I use this thread to know when he’s in the news again.