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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
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To: greenspirit who wrote (80592)11/18/2000 12:08:57 AM
From: mcweazy  Read Replies (1) of 769667
 
This is authoritative:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Florida recount has left many puzzled not only about the results of last Tuesday's elections, but about the method: The kind of punch-card ballot under scrutiny in Florida has been notorious for its inaccuracy.

The so-called "Votomatic" system developed in the 1960s is based on technology that has been considered obsolete for years. Now, the outcome of the November 7 presidential race hangs on whether as few as two Florida counties are allowed to conduct manual recounts of punch-card ballots to include those wrongly discarded due to "hanging" chad.

The hanging bits of paper and the miscounts they cause have long been a problem. Now, with Vice President Al Gore trailing Texas Gov. George W. Bush by only 300 votes in Florida, Gore aides have gone to court to push for manual recounts. Bush's campaign argues that hand counts are unreliable, and machine counts will result in a more accurate count.

But the punch-card ballots used in counties like Broward and Palm Beach counties are so prone to inaccurate counting that a National Bureau of Standards report recommended their elimination more than a decade ago. The bureau stated in 1988: "It is generally not possible to exactly duplicate a count obtained on pre-scored punch cards."

Other groups have reached the same conclusion, for the same reason -- that the so-called "chad" left over from marking the ballot can foul the machines used to count votes, forcing the machine to kick out the ballot. Among the races that led to those assessments was a 1984 race for property appraiser in Palm Beach County, Florida -- one of the counties at the center of the dispute in the presidential race.
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