Your objection would have to apply to faintly stamped names, too. As I said, there would be dirt, smudges, letters that could be detected but not read. And there would be smudges on other ballots that would have to be distinguished from double voting.
A machine could be designed to do this, of course. Machines in other counties worked five times better, in this regard.
All I am saying is that there is nothing contemptible about the voters, thousands of them, 500% more than the voters who didn't get those loser machines, who tried to dislodge the chad with the stylus and failed.
And that in some percentage of those cases their attempt to "write" GORE or BUSH is, to a bipartisan group, perfectly clear.
Not in all. Some bulges, dimples, are debatable, and must be tossed out, just as some stamped names will be too faint to read.
There are those who want even a chad clinging to the ballot by only one or two corners thrown out, though it's hard not to suspect they would want that vote counted for their man.
But anyway, those voters were disenfranchised by the thousands and insulted on top of it, and instead of sympathy from their fellow Americans whose votes were counted, they receive hate.
If there were sensitive technology in the cases of faint ink vs dark, or bulges vs holes, all the ballots could, as you propose, be processed by it.
But we don't have that, do we? We have only eyes.
Probably we shouldn't count even the perfectly clear (to bipartisan judges' eyes) faint ink -- or bulges. I gave the argument why perhaps it is a "slippery slope" precedent. But the attitude toward those who lost their vote is most peculiar to me.
It isn't ridiculous that they are shocked and upset and want their clear attempts to vote counted. It isn't contemptible. It isn't senile. It isn't stupid. It isn't uneducated. It isn't stealing.
To them, it's GORE or BUSH stamped faintly, but, in many --not all-- cases, legibly. |
