This was and still is precisely the system used in almost all of Florida.
This is forty-year-old technology whose shortcomings are being proven in Palm
Beach County this instant. The little rectangles you try to punch out with
the steel punch sometimes do not detach from the ballot, leaving what are
called "hanging chad," which confuses the electronic reading devices as
hundreds of ballots fly by them during the counting process. Punching two
rectangles is possible, even by someone reasonably intelligent.
Further, conduct 10 different counts of these types of ballots, and you will
get 10 different results. A recount is no more accurate than the first
count.
In Leon County, Florida, the supervisor of elections has gone to a different
system, whereby each voter fills in an oval on a ballot with a simple lead
pencil. The recently concluded recount there resulted in an astonishing
exact replication of the first vote total. Not a single vote out of place.
In 1988, when I ran against Janet Reno, one of the three major issues I
raised was the antiquated electronic voting system in Dade County and around
the state because of voting irregularities generated by it, including the
option of fraud. The computer program controlling the electronic reader can
be altered, clandestinely, to change the count. I cited the California
Attorney General's white paper in doing so. Reno resisted the idea. She
knew something.
We now are seeing today what she knew, and what the Bush team ought to do.
They must abandon their ill-timed and ill-conceived lawsuit to try to block
the hand recounting of ballots. They must go down another path, the path of
seeking a hand recount in the entire state.
Granted, the Bush team did not raise this option within the 72-hour period
required, but equitable principles applied by a court can mandate a
statewide hand recount even now. The change in the vote total in Palm Beach
is an unwitting gift by the Democrats to the Republicans. Are they smart
enough to grab it?
The unintended gift allows Bush to take the "high road" of wanting an
accurate vote, and it allows him to pick up more votes. Just now on Fox
News, it is reported than a hand recount in Republican Polk County has
delivered more than 100 additional votes for Bush.
Bush can now have Florida "handed" to him.
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