For the Gore Team, a Moment of High Drama nytimes.com
While the Bush Team is hoist on their own expert petard, as it were. I wouldn't say this makes any difference just yet, but it's entertaining anyway.
The dramatic moment came during testimony by John Ahmann,
an expert produced by Gov. George W. Bush's lawyers to
vouch for the reliability of the Votomatic, the voting device
used in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties. Mr. Ahmann
calmly recited his background as the man who helped develop
the Votomatic for IBM, along the way making dozens of
improvements that earned him 11 patents.
With the help of computer graphics, Mr. Ahmann methodically
set about knocking down theories advanced by the Gore team
to explain how the Votomatic could have produced thousands
of paper ballots unreadable to counting machines.
Mr. Gore's lawyers have argued, for example, that the
Votomatics failed because they were choked by mounds of
chads, the tiny pieces of paper that are punched out of the
ballots.
Nonsense, said Mr. Ahmann, noting that each Votomatic can
hold 1.5 million chads and function fine.
It was then, however, that Stephen Zack, the Gore lawyer who
was preparing to cross-examine Mr. Ahmann, read the
document that had been rushed to him: a patent application Mr.
Ahmann had submitted two decades ago for an improved
version of the Votomatic.
The application listed an array of problems with the existing
Votomatic, many of them similar to the flaws being argued by
the Gore lawyers. Mr. Ahmann's application said the
Votomatics regularly experienced malfunctions that could trip
up counting machines.
"The surface of the punchboard has become so clogged with
chips as to prevent a clean punching operation," Mr. Ahmann
wrote in his application. "Incompletely punched cards can
cause serious errors to occur in data-processing operations
utilizing such cards."
Confronted with his old application, Mr. Ahmann before long
was agreeing that in close elections, a manual recount is not a
bad idea. The effect of his testimony was written plain in the
strained facial expressions of the Bush legal team and in what
Mr. Zack did when Mr. Ahmann left the stand.
He shook Mr. Ahmann's hand.
Cheers, Dan. |
