ELECTION 2000, Day 32
Dimple theory dealt
new blow
Miami elections official
says precincts
reported no
ballot-punching problems
By Paul Sperry
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON -- In a new blow to
Al Gore's claim that clogged
voting equipment prevented
hundreds of Miami-Dade County
voters from cleanly punching
the ballot for him, the
county's No. 2 elections
official told WorldNetDaily
that his office received no
reports of such voting problems
on Election Day or since then.
Lawyers for Gore have argued
that chad -- the little
perforated squares on the
ballot that count as votes when
removed -- piled inside
voting-booth trays to the point
where they backed up against
ballot punch-holes and blocked
the insertion of styluses.
"I have not heard anyone
complain about that, and I hear
a hell of a lot of problems
that go on at precincts," said
John Clouser, Miami-Dade County
assistant supervisor of
elections.
He says he heard no such
complaints despite installing
about 100 extra phones at
election headquarters and
hiring about 100 extra workers
to man them on Election Day.
He also says no clerks at the
county's 578 polling places
felt the need to call county
maintenance workers to clean
out chad trays in the vote
recorders used in the Votomatic
booths.
"I'm also in charge of our
warehouse, and obviously, they
would have gotten calls at our
warehouse saying, 'Hey, we need
cleaned-out Votomatics,' "
Clouser said.
The only complaints about the
booths involved a few
burned-out fluorescent bulbs,
which were replaced, he says.
Clouser, a Democrat, says the
Gore claim is a "red herring."
"And of course, the press is
going for it," he said.
He estimates -- based on the
testimony of one of the
inventors of the vote recorder,
who last weekend said it would
take 1 million to 1.5 million
chad to block a stylus -- that
it would take a minimum of 400
presidential elections to pack
a tray full enough to make
Gore's claim plausible.
"If you say that there were
2,500 chad per Votomatic per
presidential election, we'd
have to do the equivalent of
400 to 600 presidential
elections in order to fill
these things up," Clouser said.
"And I don't think we've had
400 to 600 presidential
elections since 1977," he
quipped, when the county
started using the Votomatic.
And that assumes the trays
weren't cleaned out.
Clouser says he's never used
the Votomatic to vote. He's had
to vote by absentee ballot,
because he can't take time out
from his official duties on
Election Day to vote.
So he decided to finally use
the Votomatic himself, in
conducting an experiment to see
how hard it would be for the
novice voter to punch out the
chad after following the
instructions in the booth.
"On Thanksgiving day, I took 20
ballot cards each with 312
positions (or perforated
squares). I punched through
each one of the 312 positions,"
he said. "That's 6,240 chad
that went down into the (trays
of the) vote recorders."
"I pulled all 20 cards out (of
the throat of the vote
recorder). Guess what? Clean as
a whistle -- every single one
of them. No hangers. Nothing,"
Clouser added. "All I did was
follow the instructions."
Gore, who is contesting
President-elect George W.
Bush's certified 537-vote
Florida win, wants some 9,000
undervoted ballots in
Miami-Dade County checked by
hand for indentations, or
"dimples," in the chad next to
his name.
He insists that hundreds, if
not thousands, of voters meant
to vote for him, but failed to
punch through the ballot and
register a hole that would be
picked up by the counting
machine.
The Florida Supreme Court is
deliberating over whether to
uphold or overturn a
lower-court decision to block a
hand recount of the ballots
there.
The court earlier had allowed a
hand recount after Gore
protested the election results.
But Miami-Dade, seeing it
couldn't meet the court-imposed
deadline, stopped its recount
after looking at just some of
the total 10,750 ballots with
no votes for president.
Clouser says the blank votes
usually are not a mistake, or
oversight, but a form of
protest by voters.
"Take my sister-in-law in
California, for example. She
told me, 'John, I don't like
either of these people, so I
said to heck with it and didn't
vote for president,' "he said.
"She consciously made that
decision."
Some voters also may have
decided to skip the top race
because they were overwhelmed
by the unusually thick field of
presidential candidates.
Florida listed 10 names on its
ballot -- the most of any
state.
Clouser says that if Gore is
allowed to inspect the ballots
by hand, the officials doing
the inspecting should not find
any indentations that shouldn't
be there.
He says he kept a tight chain
of custody over the ballots,
starting with their storage in
the warehouse. The ballots are
now in the custody of the
circuit court in Tallahassee,
Fla.
"They have been under a legal
chain of custody. That is,
we've had police officers here
around the clock," Clouser
said. "That has cost taxpayers
$2,500 per day for about 30
days."
He also says he inspected the
ballots for flaws several weeks
before they were sent out to
the precincts.
"We have someone go to the
warehouse and check the
condition of the ballot cards
before we distribute them," he
said, "so that we don't have
any surprises on election
night."
The warehouse inspector, who
"has two engineering degrees,"
has worked for the county 25
years, he said.
Clouser adds that the warehouse
is climate-controlled to
protect the cards from warping
or buckling from the Miami
humidity.
"They were kept in an
air-conditioned, locked room,"
he said.
Clouser says the process of
printing the cards does not
create any dimpling.
"We've never had a problem with
dimples or the quality of the
chad on the ballot cards after
we've gotten them from the
printers," he said.
Miami-Dade contracts with
Omaha, Neb.-based Election
Systems & Software Inc. to
print its ballot cards. The
company prints them at a plant
in Addison, Texas.
Clouser, who's in charge of
procuring voting equipment,
says he's looking at newer
systems, such as
optical-scanned paper
balloting, to replace the
Votomatic, even though he says
it's worked fine -- at least
until Gore's legal team made a
fuss.
"The punch-card system has
worked pretty well for us for
23 years," he said. |
