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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: willcousa who wrote (122582)	1/19/2001 11:38:46 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

willcousa, I'm citing the ballot reject rate. Ballots can be rejected as overvotes or undervotes. They can be correctly rejected because they really have 2 votes or no votes, or they can be rejected despite clear voter intent because the machine could not read them. For example, a punch card ballot may be unreadable due to the chad effect; an incompletely punched hole closes again in the machine. You really have to manually inspect them to tell which is which. So certainly part of the error rate includes voter error. But all the recounts that have been done, even with tight standards, have found votes in the undervote, and in the overvote too, if the voter voted twice for the same candidate. So the real error rate is not zero; in some places it must be more than 1% or 2% of the vote. It is certainly far more than the margin of victory in this election. Interestingly, in the hearings that are currently being held, a number of county elections supervisors complained that they could not get any budget from Katherine Harris for voter education, and that they quit even asking after a while. One said "This is a state that spends $35 million dollars a year to tell people how to play Lotto, but nothing to tell them how to vote". So I'm sure that plays into the voter error rate as well. I just get the impression of a shoddily managed process, and a heavily politicized one to boot.