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To: Steve Dietrich who wrote (37907)	11/17/2000 3:04:32 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Respond to of 64865

Hi Steve, Thanks for mentioning Bill Joy's name. I didn't see him on the TV show, but in a recent post I had be-moaned the endless parade of lawyers & politician yacking about what I viewed as an engineering problem. So at least we finally get to see an engineer on-screen. Believe it or not manually-counted votes have already been accepted as part of the tally in Fla. Those are ballots that were recounted by hand in a number of counties without respect to "standards" for determining just what constitutes a vote. In fact, a number of hand-counted votes from the infamous Palm Beach County are included in the totals that will be certified this Saturday. The intent of the voter on a per-ballot basis can and most likely will be debated. However, that point is really moot right now. It is something that should properly have been debated BEFORE the election. The reason it is moot now, however is that too much time has passed for there to be any integrity left in a full recount. Blame it on the media (type of card used to punch), blame it on the voters for not following instructions, blame it on the county for not completing all the manual counts by the deadline. But after all is said & done there is no way to trust the condition of 10,000 or so "un-counted" ballots from Palm Beach County which vary in state from having no holes punched for president to those having partially-punched holes for president. That's why there are laws in Fla. governing the counting of votes. There is a hard deadline for the submission of results. This is to prevent all sorts of fraud and endless re-counting of votes. I think everyone agrees that there needs to be some kind of deadline for the vote tallies to be in, right?? Fla. says "you have 7 days from the election". Maybe that's too short, maybe that's too long, but that's what the law reads. That means you have to have a really good reason why if you fail to meet the deadline: acts of God, breakdown of equipment, breakdown of process, allegations of fraud. It also means that you have to get your act together, quickly to recount the votes. For example, after the initial tally in Palm Beach County they could have started a mandated automatic recount the following day & then recounted the rejects by hand as they made their way out of the "votomatic" (or whatever it's called). They could have easily cross-checked the totals at that time to make sure they came out the same. Then they say "we have x votes, y undercounts, & z overcounts with no equipment failures & no procedural failure & no fraud. They bundle up & secure the undercounts & let someone decide how they should be counted. At that point there would have been x legal votes, y disputed votes & z votes to throw out automatically. Had that been done within 1 week of the election, it would have made a strong case for the County when it came to a court challenge. Then the debate would focus solely on what constitutes a vote and what doesn't. As of now, 3 days past the deadline, in Palm Beach County 99% of the votes have been counted twice, 1% of the votes have been counted 3 times, and ALL the votes are being counted, still again, this time by hand. To this date, no one can yet predict when the "final" count will be completed. You can bet there will be delays caused by conflict from both parties about which way to tally a given ballot. Do you think a bank would allow that kind of nonsense if it were to audit individual accounts by hand??? If all that