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XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SUN NOV 11, 2001 18:09:35 ET XXXXX

BIG MEDIA FLORIDA RECOUNT: GORE TOPPED BUSH IF ALL UNDER/OVER VOTES COUNTED; LEGAL STRATEGY DESTROYED CHANCES

**World Exclusive** **Must Credit DRUDGE REPORT**

A vote-by-vote review of untallied ballots in the 2000 Florida presidential election commissioned by the nation's main media outlets shows Al Gore edged ahead of George W. Bush "under all the scenarios for counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide," the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

APCNNNYTWASHPOSTLATIMESNEWSDAYCHICAGOTRIB will splash in Monday editions an election review which will ignite total controversy during a time of war, publishing sources told DRUDGE on Sunday.

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Bush would have narrowly prevailed in the partial recounts sought by Gore, but Gore could have "reversed the outcome -- by the smallest of margins -- had he pursued and gained a complete statewide recount," according to one interpretation of the database compiled by the monstermedia consortium. [Each media outlet will produce a news analysis based on the database product.]

Under any standard that counted all disputed votes in Florida, Gore erased Bush's advantage and emerged with a tiny lead that ranged from 42 to 171 votes.

Gore followed a legal strategy that would have led to his defeat even if it had not been rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, according to one interpretation set for publication.

Gore sought a recount of a small number of disputed ballots while the review indicates his only chance lay in a course he advocated publicly but did not pursue in court -- a full statewide recount of untallied votes!

Gore took a 171-vote lead when the consortium tried to recreate how each county said it would handle a court-ordered statewide recount, and a 42-vote lead under what was called the "Palm Beach standard".

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All outcomes were closer than the 537 votes of Bush's official victory, the media outlets will claim, while noting it would be impossible to interpret the survey results as definitive, with such narrow margins in all directions.

Impacting...

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2001

Answers

What irony!

Gore suggested a statewide recount at a time when Bush was certain to turn it down, as anyone in Bush's position would have done at that particular point in the legal battle. Gore's "offer" was a purely political move. Gore really didn't want a statewide recount, but he knew that Bush didn't want to give legitimacy to any recount of the sort the Democrats were demanding.

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2001

All outcomes were closer than the 537 votes of Bush's official victory, the media outlets will claim, while noting it would be impossible to interpret the survey results as definitive, with such narrow margins in all directions.

Well? Who won, then?

Was there a point to this recount?

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2001

Speaking of Al Gore, my mother (Democrat but thinks Gore is a total turkey) recently advanced the theory that the beard is an attempt to disguise how fat he has gotten. He's been drowning his sorrows in food.

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2001

It's a good way to hide a double chin!

Back to the ballot--just saw a CNN report and they more or less said Bush won, although there were some problems (which they went into). That was a bit of a surprise.

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2001

ChicTrib

Ballots, rules, voter error led to 2000 election muddle, review shows

By Jeff Zeleny, Michael J. Berens and Geoff Dougherty Tribune staff reporters

The most comprehensive study of the troubled presidential election in Florida shows the main culprits were simple and fixable: ballot design, inconsistent election rules and voter error.

The yearlong review of the Florida election reveals that even if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a recount of ballots, there is no clear indication that Democrat Al Gore would have gained enough votes to triumph over Republican George W. Bush.

A close examination of the ballots suggests that more Floridians attempted to choose Gore over Bush. But more Gore supporters improperly marked their ballots, leaving Bush with more valid votes.

The independent study offers an unprecedented look into the haphazard process of the making of a president, highlighting a fragmented system in 67 counties that invalidated thousands of votes and clouded the unprecedented legal odyssey to the White House.

A consortium of eight news organizations, including the Tribune Co., commissioned the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to take the deepest look yet into the Florida ballot box, trying to determine why the state's voting system broke down.

The study's findings refute some commonly held assumptions. Contrary to popular belief that first-time minority voters likely spoiled significant numbers of ballots, the black voter turnout did not appear to affect problems at the polls. In fact, the percentage of blacks turning out to vote was barely higher than in the previous presidential contest.

The study does not support charges that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to halt recounts altered the course of history. The numbers suggest that Bush would have prevailed had the counting continued under the standards set by the Florida Supreme Court.

Finally, each campaign's strategy for recounts now seems flawed. In fact, had Gore's top legal argument been granted -- that four specific counties get a hand recount -- it would have benefited Bush. Had one of Bush's arguments been accepted -- favoring the counting of ballot chads detached at two corners -- it would have benefited Gore.

If the ballots had been recounted using a restrictive standard favored by Bush lawyers, the study found Gore could have won the state by about 100 votes. But Gore's initial strategy to ask for recounts in four counties limited his campaign's ability to pick up the number of ballots that a statewide inspection may have.

The Florida Ballot Project reviewed 175,010 ballots that went uncounted in the presidential election, only a fraction of the state's 6.1 million votes cast. The study focused on two kinds of ballots that were the subject of dispute during the recount: undervotes, where a vote for president could not be detected, and overvotes, where more than one candidate was selected.

In the end, the county-to-county disparity between election laws, the decisions made by local election officials and the fact that a small margin of ballots could not be located for review made drawing precise conclusions impossible for researchers.

"In my opinion, it's too close to call," said Kirk Wolter, a senior vice president at the National Opinion Research Center, a nonpartisan group that specializes in social science analysis. "One could never know from this study alone who won the election."

The study, however, illustrates the Gore campaign was correct in focusing its first complaints on the design of the ballots. The review showed there were thousands of ballots marked for Gore and Pat Buchanan, compared to fewer than 100 for Bush and Buchanan in Palm Beach County, where the ballot trouble began.

In fact, it probably is impossible to design a study that would determine the winner of the presidential election. That is particularly true given the degree to which the Florida election was tainted. Thousands of felons voted, those not registered were allowed to vote, some voted twice, and even the dead voted in small numbers. Other voters were erroneously turned away from the polls.

Instead, the review was undertaken to examine the balloting process and provide insight into what happened. Even that goal was hampered because election workers in one county couldn't determine which ballots they disqualified. In addition, chads in some punch cards were knocked loose during handling, altering their original appearance.

The Tribune examination detailed nine possible options based on the legal and political events that unfolded during the 36-day recount, which ended with Bush winning Florida by 537 votes and gaining the presidency. Depending on how the ballots were counted, Gore might have garnered more votes, while in other cases the margin stayed with Bush.

For example, depending on how voter intent is interpreted on the disputed ballots, Bush emerged in front by more than 1,700 votes or Gore prevailed by fewer than 200.

The diversity of results is limited only by the dozens of ways the election could have been conducted, underscoring the critical role that subjectivity by election officials played in the final outcome.

Officials had to determine whether to count dangling chads, where the corner of paper hung from the ballot, or so-called dimpled chads, where the paper ballot was only indented.

For the first time, the ballot review offers insight into what Florida voters may have been trying to do when they walked into their polling places on Nov. 7, 2000.

Determining the intent of the voter was the single largest controversy during the presidential recount last year. While no review can ever definitively resolve the question, the study offers strong suggestions that more voters intended to vote for Gore, following the trend of the national popular vote.

The study revealed that Florida voters who invalidated their ballots by selecting Gore and another candidate outnumber those who chose Bush and another candidate by a 3-1 ratio, which suggests more of them likely intended to vote for Gore.

Had different voting equipment been in place statewide, voters would have been given a second chance after they spoiled their ballot and the outcome of the presidential race could have been different.

Consider the differences found in two counties -- Leon and Gadsden -- separated by the Ochlockonee River and the two broadest extremes of how votes are counted. In both counties voters use a pencil to fill in ovals on the ballot.

But if a voter in Leon County, which includes the state capital Tallahassee, made a mistake on a ballot, the counting machine automatically spit out the ballot back into the voter's hand. A second or even a third chance was allowed to vote properly.

This voting system had an error rate of less than 1 percent.

In Gadsden County, the only predominantly black Florida county, no second chance was given because county officials said they couldn't afford counting machines in every polling place. The highest percentage of discarded ballots in any Florida county occurred here, with 12.4 percent of the ballots invalidated.

By the next election, the state's new voting laws require Gadsden and 14 other counties with similar equipment to buy new machines that give voters a second chance if they spoil their ballot.

A year after the bitter election, both candidates seem to have little interest in dissecting the vote. "The American people moved on a long time ago," White House spokeswoman Nicolle Devenish said Sunday.

In a written statement, Gore said: "We are a nation of laws and the presidential election of 2000 is over."

To capture Florida, Democrats paid particular attention to the state's black voters, many of whom were already outraged with Gov. Jeb Bush over a plan called One Florida, which was designed to curb affirmative action. The controversy was so intense, black state legislators held a two-day sit-in in the governor's office.

With help from the NAACP, black Democrats mounted a $12 million voting drive in Florida and other key states last year.

Reports of polls overwhelmed with voters were common. Voter News Service, a research organization that conducted exit polls, said black turnout had been impressive.

The anger only increased, though, when it became clear blacks had encountered widespread voting problems. The Tribune analysis found that the ballot spoilage rate in majority black precincts was one in every 45 votes. In other precincts, it was one in 142.

In addition, registered voters complained poll workers turned them away for failing to present the right identification. A botched effort to clean up the state voter registration files after an election-fraud scandal in 1999 instead yielded a large group of people who had been mistakenly cut from the voter rolls as convicted felons when they had no criminal records.

When strategists and experts dissected the troubled election, many of the problems were attributed to unusually high turnout. Political observers theorized the voter registration drives had increased the proportion of voters who were inexperienced and uneducated citizens and more prone to make mistakes on their ballots.

The theory had one problem: It wasn't true.

A new analysis of Florida voter registration records by the Tribune shows black turnout increased only 2 percentage points over the 1996 general election, sharply contradicting earlier studies based on less complete information.

While there were 188,000 more black voters in 2000, the increase mirrored that of white voters, rather than increasing rapidly in response to the voter registration drive.

So black voters had no more influence over the result of the election last year than they did in 1996. Only if an unusual proportion of those new voters were uneducated could they be responsible for the high percentage of rejected ballots.

But the analysis showed black voters varied little from whites in terms of experience. Voters of both races had participated in an average of three prior elections in Florida. And the percentage of blacks voting in their first election was just a few percentage points higher than that of whites.

The exit poll numbers showed higher black turnout because measuring Florida's black vote is a difficult task, said Voter News Service editorial director Murray Edelman. Accurate exit polls depend on questioning a sample of voters who closely mirror the entire population, but Florida's black voters are not evenly distributed across the state. Because these voters are clustered in select precincts a random sample of Florida precincts could miss many of them entirely.

The news service suspected its numbers were high, Edelman said, and even warned about the possibility of an inaccurate estimate. "But the numbers take on a life all their own," he said. Edelman said he would trust the lower numbers because they were based on voter rolls rather than a survey.

While those numbers debunk much of the previously held beliefs about the black vote and disqualified ballots, the reason for why so many black votes were discarded remains unclear.

Even though civil rights groups, law enforcement agencies and newspapers devoted thousands of hours investigating the possibility of organized fraud, little evidence has turned up to support those allegations.

A case that remains curious is found in Precinct No. 222 in Carol City, a black working-class neighborhood in the shadow of Pro Player Stadium, outside Miami.

The Tribune analysis shows that particular precinct had an unusually high number of ballots punched for three or more presidential candidates.

State Rep. Kendrick Meek, a Democrat whose district includes precinct 222, said the neighborhood is filled with long-time voters who are well educated and politically savvy.

"Obviously this is disturbing," Meek said. "It's not like they have a lot of turnover. It's a middle-class community. They know exactly how to vote, when to vote, and they do it often."

Although the numbers do not document fraud, they add credence to problems described by people like Rev. Jack Smith at the Miami Gardens Church of Christ, the precinct's polling place.

On Election Day, he stood watch outside.

"There was a huge turnout of precinct workers," he said. "Some of them almost came into the building. As soon as they saw a car roll in, they were at the car."

Smith said he saw political operatives distributing palm cards, urging voters to cast their ballots for three or more presidential candidates -- advice that would invalidate the ballot and also explain the unusual voting pattern.

"I am 100 percent certain that went on," Smith said. "I saw that happen."

More than 90 percent of the voters in the precinct are Democrats, so spoiled votes there would be likely to benefit anyone but Gore.

Smith said he could not identify the operatives, and isn't sure which party they represented. A county election supervisor would occasionally drive up to the polling place, he said, at which point the operatives "would fade into the woodwork."

"There was massive confusion, and someone brought it on intentionally," said Smith.

The confusing designs of ballots were at the root of more discarded ballots than anything else in Florida, the analysis showed.

For the first time, 10 candidates appeared on the presidential ballot, prompting election officials to devise creative solutions to find a spot for everyone's name on the paper ballot. The reason for the high number of candidates dates back to 1998 when Florida voters approved a little-noticed constitutional amendment that made it easier for minority-party candidates to place their names on the ballot.

"They wanted to put everyone but their coon dog on the ballot," said Lana Morgan, the supervisor of elections in Lafayette County, who worried even before the election that voters would be misled by the unusually large slate.

As election supervisors searched for creative solutions, they unwittingly created a problem of enormous magnitude: a variety of ballots that cost tens of thousands of votes.

Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore, concerned about the large number of candidates on the ballot, did not want to squeeze the names onto one page. Many of her voters are retirees with less-than-perfect vision.

So LePore, a Democrat, designed a ballot with larger type that spread the candidates across facing pages. With the ballot-book spine running down the middle, the pages resembled the wings of a butterfly.

That decision led to weeks of agony for LePore, as angry Democrats accused her of blowing the election for Gore, and it illustrates a problem common to many other Florida counties.

The Tribune analysis shows ballots with the presidential candidates split across two columns or pages were far more likely to result in invalidated votes. Counties using those designs had overvote rates four times higher than other counties.

If they had used better-designed ballots, Florida might have seen thousands fewer overvotes. Gore, whose name appeared on overvoted ballots three times as often as Bush's, presumably would have picked up most of those votes.

In Palm Beach, the butterfly ballot aligned the punch hole for Buchanan directly below the hole for Gore.

Many of the county's elderly Jewish constituents said they'd confused the holes and voted for Buchanan, a conservative commentator and Reform Party candidate who has been accused of anti-Semitism.

Buchanan received 3,407 votes, more than in any other county.

The consortium review of overvotes shows another group of votes that may have been intended for Gore and instead went to Buchanan: those where the voter punched holes for both men. More than 6,600 votes in Palm Beach showed that pattern, while hardly any showed votes for Bush and Buchanan.

After the election, LePore acknowledged that the ballot design was unfortunate. Even Buchanan said voters surely meant to vote for Gore.

As historians, political strategists and journalists continue to dissect the election, advocates from all sides point to possible scenarios and begin every question with: "What if ... ?"

There are few consistent rules governing election recounts. Each of Florida's 67 counties had devised their own standards. What qualified for a vote in one county -- a hanging chad, for instance -- was disqualified in another.

These problems, long known by election officials, had been widely ignored because most races were won by wide margins. But even on election morning, it was becoming clear a wide margin would not exist in this race.

Even though Bush held an early lead, state law required all counties to automatically recount ballots because the margin was so narrow. Some counties ran the ballots through their counting machines again but others conducted only cursory or haphazard ballot reexaminations, and Bush remained the leader.

Gore forces called for a broader recount, but only in four major counties believed to be democratic strongholds: Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Volusia. Under this scenario, ironically, Gore would have lost Florida by a couple of hundred votes, the analysis found.

Bush fought hard against recounts but at one point his attorneys made statements that voter intent was best discerned by counting chads that had at least two corners detached. An analysis of that scenario, however, shows Gore might have won by slightly more than 100 votes.

Gore's demand for a limited recount touched off a contentious debate centering on how to deduce voter intent.

Was a hanging chad a clear signal of a vote? How many corners had to be detached to constitute a hanging chad and to constitute a legal vote? Were noticeable depressions in candidate squares indications of vote attempts? How deep did the depression have to be?

For a time, it looked as though there might even be a statewide hand recount. The Florida Supreme Court authorized such a recount, but it was halted when Bush's attorneys appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The consortium study tried to figure out which candidate might have benefited most if the statewide recount had been completed. The statistical analysis shows that Bush likely would have prevailed.

This finding runs counter to the conventional wisdom at the time that the U.S. Supreme Court decision had blocked Gore's path to the White House.

No matter how many times the Florida ballots are reviewed and how many ballot reviews are conducted by media organizations and academic groups, many irregularities will never be detected and the votes of people like Louis Connally will never be recovered.

Connally cast his ballot in the presidential election two weeks before the race became testy. For the entire 36-day recount, the 86-year-old retired engineer sat inside his small nursing home room at St. Catherine Laboure Manor in Jacksonville and watched the spectacle unfold on cable television.

Not for one moment did the Navy veteran think his vote hadn't been counted. But all the while, Connally's absentee ballot sat in the rejected pile in the Duval County Supervisor of Elections office because the signature on his absentee ballot form didn't match the handwriting on his voter registration card from 1966.

Three years ago, Connally suffered a stroke and his hands have since turned brittle. His once businesslike, swooping signature has been reduced to an indistinguishable puddle of ink.

"I think it stinks," Connally said, peering over the frames of his large glasses when a reporter told him the news. "I've voted in every election since I was 21. I take it very seriously."

Election supervisors are required by law to notify voters when their absentee ballots are rejected because of a signature problem, but officials here said they were unaware of the law.

The election did inspire Florida officials to enact what their counterparts elsewhere in the nation failed to do. They adopted the most sweeping election reform measure of any other state in the country.

Consistent election rules have been written for all counties to follow. Punch card ballots have been banned. And new balloting equipment will give voters a second chance if mistakes are made on a confusing ballot.

In Congress, though, efforts aimed at bringing about major election reform have fallen short. Only in recent weeks has there been a renewed effort to fund reforms after a year of waning interest.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the tone of national politics changed almost instantly. Questions about Bush's legitimacy faded, even among many Democrats.

In August, for example, a public opinion survey showed that if the election could be replayed the results would be the same: Half of the respondents supported Bush, half supported Gore. But the president's approval ratings have since soared to nearly 90 percent. And in a poll taken this month, voters said they would now support Bush by a 4-1 ratio in a race with Gore.

The consortium study has caused little concern among Bush followers in Washington.

"Bush, Gore or a muddle," Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said last week. "It's over."

Tribune staff reporter Stephen J. Hedges contributed to this report.

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2001

CNN

Florida recount study: Bush still wins

Study reveals flaws in ballots, voter errors may have cost Gore victory

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN.

NORC dispatched an army of trained investigators to examine closely every rejected ballot in all 67 Florida counties, including handwritten and punch-card ballots. The NORC team of coders were able to examine about 99 percent of them, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators. In addition, the uncertainties of human judgment, combined with some counties' inability to produce the same undervotes and overvotes that they saw last year, create a margin of error that makes the study instructive but not definitive in its findings.

As well as attempting to discern voter intent in ballots that might have been re-examined had the recount gone forward, the study also looked at the possible effect of poor ballot design, voter error and malfunctioning machines. That secondary analysis suggests that more Florida voters may have gone to the polls intending to vote for Democrat Al Gore but failed to cast a valid vote.

In releasing the report, the consortium said it is in no way trying to rewrite history or challenge the official result -- that Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Rather it is simply trying to bring some additional clarity to one of the most confusing chapters in U.S. politics.

Florida Supreme Court recount ruling

On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Florida Supreme Court ruling ordering a full statewide hand recount of all undervotes not yet tallied. The U.S. Supreme Court action effectively ratified Florida election officials' determination that Bush won by a few hundred votes out of more than 6 million cast.

Using the NORC data, the media consortium examined what might have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened. The Florida high court had ordered a recount of all undervotes that had not been counted by hand to that point. If that recount had proceeded under the standard that most local election officials said they would have used, the study found that Bush would have emerged with 493 more votes than Gore.

Gore's four-county strategy

Suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted -- a hand recount in heavily Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still would have lost the election -- by a 225-vote margin statewide.

The news media consortium then tested a number of other hypothetical scenarios.

Use of Palm Beach County standard

Out of Palm Beach County emerged one of the least restrictive standards for determining a valid punch-card ballot. The county elections board determined that a chad hanging by up to two corners was valid and that a dimple or a chad detached in only one corner could also count if there were similar marks in other races on the same ballot. If that standard had been adopted statewide, the study shows a slim, 42-vote margin for Gore.

Inclusion of overvotes

In addition to undervotes, thousands of ballots in the Florida presidential election were invalidated because they had too many marks. This happened, for example, when a voter correctly marked a candidate and also wrote in that candidate's name. The consortium looked at what might have happened if a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore would have had a margin of fewer than 200 votes.

The butterfly and caterpillar ballots

One of the most controversial aspects of the Florida election was the so-called butterfly ballot used in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County. Many voters came out of the polls saying they were confused by the ballot design.

According to the study, 5,277 voters made a clean punch for Gore and a clean punch for Reform Party nominee Pat Buchanan, candidates whose political philosophies are poles apart. An additional 1,650 voters made clean punches for Bush and Buchanan. If many of the Buchanan votes were in error brought on by a badly designed ballot, a CNN analysis found that Gore could have netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush.

Eighteen other counties used another confusing ballot design known as the "caterpillar" or "broken" ballot, where six or seven presidential candidates are listed in one column and the names of the remaining minor party candidates appeared at the top of a second one. According to the study, more than 15,000 people who voted for either Gore or Bush also selected one candidate in the second column, apparently thinking the second column represented a new race.

Had many of these voters not marked a minor candidate in the second column, Gore would have netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush.

However, the double votes on both butterfly and caterpillar ballots were clearly invalid under any interpretation of the law.

Limits of the study

The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago study was commissioned by eight media companies -- The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, the St. Petersburg Times, Cox Newspapers, The Washington Post and the Tribune Co., which includes the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and Baltimore Sun, as well as other papers.

NORC used experienced staff researchers to supervise and train a larger pool of investigators, who then fanned out across Florida and personally examined 175,010 ballots provided by local election officials. The investigators recorded exactly what they saw on each ballot but made no attempt to determine whether the vote should have been counted.

From there, the media consortium took over, analyzing the raw data produced by NORC and drawing conclusions for various hypothetical scenarios.

As with any large-scale study, the NORC data is subject to some important limitations.

NORC reported serious problems with record keeping at many local election offices. NORC relied on these offices to produce the rejected ballots, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators.

Although trained to produce accurate, impartial reports, the NORC investigators are human and prone to human judgment and error. In particular, NORC discovered that male investigators were more likely to record marks on ballots than women. NORC also found a slight but statistically significant relationship between candidate marks and the investigators' party affiliation.

Most importantly, there is no guarantee that the judgments of the NORC investigators would have matched those of local election boards had the recount been permitted to proceed under any scenario.

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2001

So much for igniting "total controversy." The talking heads will make more money but even Judy Woodruff couldn't get Terry McAuliffe to say much more than he did last time--the system is flawed, some voters were disenfranchised, the Bushes, Harris, et al. "tampered" with the election--but George W. Bush is still my Commander in Chief.

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2001

Unlike most of you, I got to vote in a statewide election this last week, because I now live in Virginia. I encountered what will probably be standard: Inside the voting booth was a large heat- sensitive screen, and you make your choice with the heat of your fingertip. When all the choices are lit up to your satisfaction, you press a large button to record you choices.

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2001

The Sun-Sentinel had a quote:

""The American people moved on a long time ago," White House spokeswoman Nicolle Devenish said. "This latest media recount was an expensive undertaking that turned up additional inconclusive data."

pretty much sums it up.

Miami is slated to be using touch screens in the next election, as well as a few other counties in Florida.

-- Anonymous, November 12, 2001

The Florida election won't mean anything to me unless all absentee and armed services votes are counted as well. I'd like to see the democrats pull that BS this year!!

-- Anonymous, November 12, 2001