Something rotten in the state of Florida
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=566688
Pregnant chads, vanishing voters... the election fiasco of 2000 made
the Sunshine State a laughing stock. More importantly, it put George
Bush in the White House. You'd think they'd want to get it right this
time. But no, as Andrew Gumbel discovers, the democratic process is
more flawed than ever
29 September 2004
Of the many weird and unsettling developments in Florida since the
presidential election meltdown four years ago, none is so startling as
the fact that Theresa LePore, the calamitously incompetent elections
supervisor of Palm Beach County, still has her job. It was LePore who
chose the notorious "butterfly ballot" - a format so confusing that it
led thousands of Democrats, many of them elderly, retired Jewish
people, to punch the wrong hole, giving their vote not to Al Gore, as
they had intended, but to the right-wing, explicitly anti-Jewish
fringe candidate Pat Buchanan.
It was LePore, too, who caused huge problems for the fraught re-count
process, first by insisting on the strictest standards for determining
voter intent and then, with the final deadline 72 hours away, ordering
her staff to take the day off for Thanksgiving. As a result, Palm
Beach County fell short of completing its manual re-count on time, and
the whole process - which even under LePore's strictures had turned up
an extra 180 votes for Gore - was rendered void.
Andrew Gumbel
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=18510aff.0312160336.2b5c7467%40posting.google.com
Florida
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=18510aff.0407151138.20c60a62%40posting.google.com
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