November 14, 2004
Wednesday, October 20, 2004, 02:06 PM
NYT headline: "A Vote Deadline in Florida is Set for Today".

What happened? Florida's Sec. of State said she would enforce a legal Tuesday evening deadline for certifying the statewide vote. In the meantime, a federal judge in Miami refused to block the hand recounts.

In state court, the Gore campaign and two counties fought to get the Tuesday deadline extended but the judge did not immediately rule on the matter.

As we all recall, Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State in question, was also co-chair of Bush's presidential campaign in Florida. She was also a delegate at the Republican National Convention in 2000.

Unfortunately, most secretaries of state are partisans, and most play roles during election years that are as crucial as hers was.

Fox News got some spotlight shone on it as well:

"Senior executives for the Fox News Channel acknowledged last night that John Ellis, an executive who played a central role in the first decision on election night to project that George W. Bush had won the presidency, and who is a first cousin of Mr. Bush, spent much of the night in communication with the candidate.

The Fox executives said they had been unaware of the contact and said Mr. Ellis had misused his role with the network, perhaps damaging its reputation."

Here's the popular vote as it looked that day: Al Gore, 49,260,111, and George W. Bush, 49,043,820. Gore lead by 216,291 votes. The elctoral vote count was: Al Gore, 255, George W. Bush, 246, and undecided, 37 (Florida, New Mexico, Oregon).

Here's a quote from Ms. Harris on the recounts:

"Because there are no uniform standards governing this manual recount in four heavily Democratic areas, the votes in these four selective counties are not being counted accurately or fairly. They are being counted subjectively and selectively."

How close are we to uniform standards today? Get real!

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Betting Pool now open!
Wednesday, October 20, 2004, 02:05 PM
On what day will we learn who won the presidential elections of Nov. 2, 2004?

a) Nov. 2, at 11:00 pm PST
b) Nov 3, at 12 noon PST
c) Nov 28, after a Florida Supreme Court decision
d) Dec 13, when an elector defects during the electoral college meeting
e) We know the final tally already (see 5-4 vote from Bush v. Gore)

My vote: Dec 16. Random? Yes. You heard it here first.


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November 13 , 2000
Tuesday, October 19, 2004, 12:17 AM
NYT headline: "Recount Fight Widens as Court Case Begins".

And the subtitle: "As Bush Camp Looks to Federal Court, Gore Supporters Embrace States' Rights".

The recount itself widened too; "a divided election board in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County announced that a marathon recount, including a hand count of four sample precincts there, had produced enough discrepancies to warrant an extraordinary manual recount of all 425,000 votes cast in the county."

Volusia County workers began their own recount of 184,019 ballots, starting Nov. 12, a day behind schedule.

Sandra Guard, an election official in Seminole County, was alleged to have allowed Republican Party workers to set up shop in her office for several days and correct errors on thousands of applications for absentee ballots.

And, for an update on hanging chads: Palm Beach used the following standard to decide which chads counted and which didn't. If it was a "hanging chad" (one cornet attached to the ballot), a "swinging chad" (two corners attached), or a "tri-chad" (three corners attached), it would be counted, but if if was a "pregnant chad" (rectangle is punched or dimpled but all corners are attached), it would not be counted.

Problems with the ballots (besides the notorious butterfly ballot) started surfacing today in the news. From Fort Lauderdale:

"A funny thing happened at the polls here and in many other sites in Broward County last week. After waiting in long lines caused by heavy turnout, thousands of people stepped into the voting booths and then, if the results are to be believed, did not vote for president."

Total number of ballots: 558,007. Total ballots with no vote for president counted: 6,686.

Many people voted for Buchanan because of the poor design of the butterfly ballot. We don't have good stats on how many people punched the wrong chad, but "some county officials had heard that voters who made mistakes and asked for a second ballot were being denied them. Under Florida law they are entitled to even a third one if they mess up on the first two."


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Florida, the Sequel
Monday, October 18, 2004, 11:36 PM
As anyone who doesn't live on Mars knows by now, early voting started today in Florida, and with it, a host of problems with voting. Who knew?

Here's a survey of some of the problems:

At 9 of 14 sites in Broward County, election workers had to call in voters' names to the main office in Fort Lauderdale, where people would look the name up on the computer there. Why? Because the database connection was down.

In Duval County, the most populous county in Florida, the Supervisor of Elections, John Stafford, resigned suddenly after coming under fire for having only one site open for early voting. By way of comparison, Orange County, with nearly the same population, had 9 sites.

In Orange County, voting stopped a few minutes after it started because (no joke!) of a "faulty internet connection". Who has those computers on the Internet, anyways?! They might as well paint a large bullseye on the side of the box saying "Hack Me Now"!

Statewide, about 80,000 of the folks who were wrongly included on the felons list of ineligible voters from 2000 are probably still on that list.

Statewide, people who show up at the wrong precint and are given a provisional ballot will not have their votes counted, according to a ruling today by the Florida Supreme Court. Unfortunately, some may not get their voter registration cards telling them where to vote, until after Nov. 2; some folks have been relocated because of hurricanes and won't know where to go, and some polling places have been destroyed by storms leaving election supervisors scrambling to find new locations.

Well, that about wraps up day one in Florida. Only 15 to go!


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November 12, 2000
Monday, October 18, 2004, 01:00 AM
NYT front page headline: "Bush Sues to Halt Hand Recount in Florida".

According to the NYT, "the campaign cited the 'potential for mischief' and said the process was inherently less fair and more subjective than counting by machine."

That will be an interesting argument to try to make this time around.

"The announcement, by James A. Baker III, came a day after the Republicans criticized the Democrats for threatening to take the ballot issue to court, a step that the Republicans said would lead to endless wrangling in a number of states."

Palm Beach County was supposed to take 12 hours to conduct a manual recount of 4671 ballots. County Judge Charles Burton oversaw the process, as we all watched on TV.

"What should have been a simple question -- whether or not a vote was cast when a hole was punched in a piece of paper -- was complicated because the hole was not punched through cleanly and left a hanging or torn piece, known as a chad."

On page A32, chads got a whole column of coverage. An excerpt:

"Chads -- the term dates to the late 1950's when punch cards were the standard way of reading data into a computer -- may be unknown to the lay person, but they are so contentious that some election officials will not talk about them on the record."

A number of editorials to date called for a quick resolution and urged the candidates not to resort to the courts. The NYT repeated that sentiment on the front page:

"By next weekend, a group of scholars and senior politicians interviewed this weekend agreed, the presidential race of 2000 must be resolved, without recourse to the courts. With remarkable unanimity, they said that would be in the nation's best interests and, in the last analysis, those of the candidates, Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas." On the inside, though, Larry Tribe wrote an op-ed urging exactly the opposite: "Let the Courts Decide".


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