A little background on punchcards. Punchcards were around before electronic computers. A guy named Hollerith (a Brit if I recall) invented them for what later became the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). It was created because a client, the US Census Bureau, was taking longer and longer to process info as the population grew. The Gov't projected that soon the info would not be tabulated by the time the NEXT census occurred! So this guy Hollerith invented a piece of cardstock, with holes in it, that could be stacked up with other cards and read, one at a time, hundreds in a stack, by attempting to press a polished steel rod through it. If the rod went through, it was a "Yes" or "One". If it didn't, it was a "No" or "Zero". Mechanical counters, using clockworks technology, kept score. If a card was bent, it sometimes failed to go through the tracks correctly. If someone had "spindled" it, the card reader would mis-interpret the spindle hole as data. (In the old days, they stored pieces of paper by jamming them onto steel spindles. And yes, Virginia, lots of people stabbed themselves instead of the cardstock.) It is because of these limitations of the technology that punchcards must never be "punched, bent, folded, spindled, or mutilated." Anyway, if I recall, around the time that the first electronic computers came out (using vacuum tubes don't cha know) they switched from steel rods to light beams. Just as the present day hand-counters hold a ballot up to a light to see if there's a hole there for "Buchanan", that's _exactly_ how a 60s vintage optical card reader works. A pulse of light sends a "yes" to the counter. What a card reader doesn't see is a 'circled' ballot instead of a punched one. And if someone weakly makes an indentation (without puncture), naturally the card reader can't 'see' that. If a card is punched but the "chip" doesn't fall off the card, it can hang on by a corner or an edge, becoming a "chad". If the chad falls over the hole during the reading process, no light gets through, so it misses the vote. It's possible that an early count didn't see a hole (because of a chad) but during all of this handling this week, the chads are falling off. Of course, it's also possible that cards are picking up extra holes either by accident or by a felony fraud. An unmarked ballot? Oops! No more! It just became a valid vote! A valid vote? Oops! No more! It just became a double-punch! So the technology has some limitations but it is other-worldly in its impartiality. I guess the primary limitation is that stupid, reckless, senile, ill-informed, illiterate, or just plain hurried voters simply "do not compute". Jim This edition of Ask Doctor Science has been brought to you by the letter "V" and the number "1".
