Hey buddy! Good to see you!
The chad argument won't fly. It's a matter of physics. The ballot is a piece of card stock, very similar in weight to a manila folder, and pretty much the same color. The ballots are pre-scored so that when they are inserted into the ballot machine, these pre-scored spots match up with a hole next to a name or whatever. The stylus is about an inch and a half long and looks a bit like a 4d nail with a blunt end. It's just smaller than the hole that sits above the pre-scored ballot. Half of the stylus is a plastic handle that can be held comfortably in the fingers. The procedure is to press down where you wish to vote. When you press down, the stylus goes through the little round hole on top and the pre-scored ballot, and the center of the pre-scored area falls out. That's a chad.
In my opinion, and I am not an expert on this, if you have your ballot correctly inserted in the machine, (and you would know it if you didn't because there are alignment holes in the ballot that must be aligned with the machine, and it would be very difficult to get the stylus through the ballot) and you push down, the stylus goes about a half an inch through the ballot. It is quite unusual for a chad to not disconnect totally from the ballot.
If a chad has not totally disconnected, it is quite easy to see that there is a hole in the ballot and the chad has not fully disconnected.
The "dimple" theory just won't wash, IMHO, because the instructions would not have been followed. Now, I don't want to argue about who got or did not get instructions, because I have no way of arguing that point. I'm not sure an argument that someone who was uneducated or unable to fully understand the process would be at a disadvantage cannot be validly made.
But the mechanical part of this, the actual voting, is pretty cut and dried. |
