To: Carl R. who wrote (45 ) 11/11/2000 3:58:50 AM From: Zeev Hed Read Replies (1) | Respond to Carl, I really do not have an answer for those 20,000 voters. By the way, in that town meeting, that figure for 1996 was reduced to 7,000 only, but the point was rightly brought up, why did they not correct this problem in the last four years (7,000 misvoting should have been an alarm signal, since it is still some 2% of the votes being thrown away). The answer that the Floridian gave was that the last election had the majority ahead by 6 MM votes (that was probably the national popular excess not Florida), and thus 7,000 votes would not have made a difference. In my opinion it should have been a "red flag". In any event, I doubt that the Gore campaign (apart of Mr Jackson) will go to court on the "butterfly", but if it is found, as rumored, that the optical readers not always read the "punch" (there are less total votes for all candidates than number of ballots?), because of obstruction left (no a "perfect punch"), then manual counting where these imperfect ballots were used should be carried out, just to know what the actual count is. I understand that the Bush campaign is the one going to court to prevent a manual recount, so let's not blame just the "dems". The interesting thing with the machine recount, it never took away any vote, it always added (in one county it added more to Bush than to Gore), thus it would be quite interesting to find out how many presidential ballots there were all together and if that sum comes to the total assigned votes between the five candidates.
