Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 7.6
The layout of the “butterfly ballot” apparently led thousands of Palm Beach
County, Florida, voters supporting candidate Al Gore to punch the hole associated with Pat
Buchanan by mistake.
(AP photo/Gary I. Rothstein)
Bush's margin of victory was incredibly small: less than 2 votes out of every 10,000 votes
cast.
Most of these counties used a keypunch voting machine in which voters select a
candidate by using a stylus to poke out a hole in a card next to the candidate's name.
Two voting irregularities were traced to the use of these machines. The first irregularity
was that sometimes the stylus doesn't punch the hole cleanly, leaving a tiny, rectangular
piece of card hanging by one or more corners. Votes with “hanging chad” are typically
not counted by automatic vote tabulators. The manual recount focused on identifying
ballots with hanging chad that ought to have been counted. The second irregularity
was that some voters in Palm Beach County were confused by its “butterfly ballot” and
mistakenly punched the hole corresponding to Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan
rather than the hole for Democratic candidate Al Gore (Figure 7.6). This confusion may
have cost Al Gore the votes he needed to win Florida [87].
The problems with the election in Florida led to a variety of actions to improve the reli-
ability of voting systems in the United States. Many states replaced paper-based systems
with direct recording electronic voting machines. (These systems are discussed in Chap-
ter 8.)
Others have suggested that voting via the Internet be used, at least as a way of casting
absentee ballots. In fact, online voting is already a reality. It was used in the 2000 Alaska
