Florida | 20 comments (20 topical, 0 hidden)
You think figuring out the ballot would help? (none / 0)

OK, let me ask you this.  You have an arrow with a button next to it pointing directly at a line centered between names for Candidate A and Candidate B.  Which candidate are you selecting if you press the button, A or B?

The only way to tell was to pull the card out from the machine, look at where the punch-out mark was next to Gore's name, carefully put the card back in while looking at that mark and looking UNDER the voting machine to see which punch lined up with that mark and feeling around to the top for the button that activates that punch.

In other words, to vote correctly you had to a) have an IQ somewhat above 135, b) have good eyesight, c) understand machinery well enough to mechanically reverse engineer from the punch space on the paper card up through the machine, d) be flexible enough to crawl up under the machine while reinserting the card and feeling around for the button that activates the desired punch, and e) do all this without attracting the attention of the booth monitor who would probably kick you out if he saw you crawling under the voting machine.

Some people tried to do this by lightly pressing one of the buttons to make a dimple in the chad, and then taking the card out to see if the Gore chad was dimpled.  If they gessed correctly, they could then finish punching out the chad.  If not, they had to punch the other chad out, but then the vote would get rejected because there was another dimpled chad on the card, or the dimpled chad would fall out in the counting machine creating an overvote.

by rbruck on 09/18/2008 12:35:28 AM EST

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Right (none / 0)
It's just the voter suppression and stopping the count that the Republicans can take credit for.

by Spencer on 09/18/2008 02:07:40 AM EST

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Right, but it wasn't a tie. (none / 0)

The tie breakers don't matter when all of the votes haven't been counted. 

And it wasn't showing ID that was the problem.  It was more that whole thing about removing people from the voting rolls for false reasons (having a name close to a felons, being black/hispanic, etc.).  When they're not on the rolls anymore, it doesn't really matter if they have ID.  Thanks Katherine and Jeb.

by Spencer on 09/18/2008 03:11:50 AM EST

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Point clearly missed. (none / 0)

The people wrongly taken off the voting rolls didn't get to vote, therefore their votes were not counted.  That's 57,000 voters in heavily Democratic areas.

Furthermore, "Take Gadsden County. Of Florida's sixty-seven counties, Gadsden has the highest proportion of black residents: 58 percent. It also has the highest "spoilage" rate, that is, ballots tossed out on technicalities: one in eight votes cast but not counted. Next door to Gadsden is white-majority Leon County, where virtually every vote is counted (a spoilage rate of one in 500).

"How do votes spoil? Apparently, any old odd mark on a ballot will do it. In Gadsden, some voters wrote in Al Gore instead of checking his name. Their votes did not count.

"Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the Commission on Civil Rights, didn't like the smell of all those spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile of tossed ballots and, deep in the commission's official findings, reported this: 14.4 percent of black votes--one in seven--were "invalidated," i.e., never counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of nonblack voters' ballots were spoiled.

"Florida's electorate is 11 percent African-American. Florida refused to count 179,855 spoiled ballots. A little junior high school algebra applied to commission numbers indicates that 54 percent, or 97,000, of the votes "spoiled" were cast by black folk, of whom more than 90 percent chose Gore. The nonblack vote divided about evenly between Gore and Bush. Therefore, had Harris allowed the counting of these ballots, Al Gore would have racked up a plurality of about 87,000 votes in Florida--162 times Bush's official margin of victory"

Doesn't sound like much of a tie.

by Spencer on 09/18/2008 03:36:09 AM EST

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Turn around their car and go home? (none / 0)

Not likely.

The voters in the Redneck Riviera were more likely to turn around their car and vote again, or go pick up as many of their neighbors as they could find and take them to the polls.

Florida.  Vote early.  Vote often.

by rbruck on 09/18/2008 09:52:53 AM EST

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Yes, that is the ballot (none / 0)
The punch arrow on the machine pointed directly at the line in-between #4 and #5.  It was impossible to tell whether a punch would have punched out #4 or would have punched out #5.

They knew this about these machines.  They have to have at least TWO BLANK PUNCHES between selections to reliably tell who the voter intended to vote for.  The rest of the ballot was made this way.  But for the Presidential selection, they used punch slots right next to each other.  The way it worked was that

* If you point to the line between Buchanan and Gore and punch, you vote for Buchanan

* If you point to the line between Gore and the Socialist candidate, you vote for Gore

The pointer could not land on a hole, it only landed on the lines.

So, the question people outside the polling area after voting were asking was, which line voted for Gore?  The line between Gore and Buchanan or the line between Gore and the Socialist?

Do you have another explanation why so many Jewish voters voted for Buchanan?

by rbruck on 09/18/2008 09:50:14 AM EST

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Florida | 20 comments (20 topical, 0 hidden)