Couple of points:
The illegality of the Palm Beach County ballot - it's not just the punch
holes being on the right. Maybe that doesn't apply to machine-counted
ballots, I don't know. But the statute also requires that the candidates
are listed according to what percentage they won in the last gubernatorial
election. The Reform Party did not come in second in the last election!
Yet they are second on the ballot. Part of the confusion of all these
"dumb" voters might be that they just automatically expected the two major
party candidates to be listed first. It's not a stupid assumption, and in
fact, we find out that their assumption was a legal requirement!
Second, the fact that the Democrats started warning voters before the polls
closed about the problematical ballots shows to me that the issue is NOT one
of sour-grapes losers. They started the complaints before any results were
known.
I'm sorry to all those (esp. non-US) who aren't obsessed with this issue
right now. I myself can't think or talk about anything else. Glad to see
we're all remembering our NJC tags.
Deb Messling
"I like cats. They give the home a heartbeat." ~Joni Mitchell
