Tamar,

>>My voting precinct has used that type of ballot in the past, even with skipped holes between the candidates. You punch the ONE hole next to the arrow. Am I missing something here?
>

>Yeah, people were told that Gore would be the second one on the ballot.

??

So? <g> That means they shouldn't have to read the thing? <g> Or that these people are SO STUPID they will believe what someone tells them when presented with solid evidence in the form of printer information?

FWIW, I think that ballot has a terrible user interface.

Many many many places use the 'Butterfly' ballot. This is absolutely nothing new. I'd bet that this has a huge series of decisions that need to be made to accomodate the 'one punch for all my Party' plus keeping all 'like' positions together (remember we had some 8 Presidential Parties represented this time) PLUS keeping the form factor to where it would be usab;e in all those old punch machines, and so forth. As others have mentioned I'm beginning to think we might just be at a place where we could issue a mag-stripe card with PIN number. All you'd need to do is lock out that voter ID once it's been used. it seems. Goodness, with wireless networks you could put the poling booths just about anywhere I'd think.

As one who's always voted on machines, I'm also fascinated by how many places seem to be using some kind of paper ballot and by the fact that, in this case, if you'd made a mistake, you were SOL. (Can someone who has voted with punch-out paper ballots tell us whether, in fact, you can get another if you screw up?)

We use the long paper cards. They have two holes in the top and you slide them into the slot and anchor them with two corresponding posts on the holder. Lines everything up just peachy.

If you 'spoil' (official term here) the ballot you are absolutely guaranteed another. The rules are required to be posted both in each booth and on the walls. We got a voting guideline several weeks before the vote and it also contained all the information with a sample ballot. I understand that this is fairly common and that in Florida the Democratic lady who created their ballot had ZERO complaints before the election on these so-called hard to read arrows and so forth. Now, when it looks like Al Gore is going to lose the Florida popular vote, and consequently the elcetion there are all these alleged problems.

Bunch of politically driven crap from a buch of people who place possessin of power above the rule of law.

They could take a great lesson from Senator Ashcroft who conceded and vowed to NOT fight the election results in Missouri where there are far more unresolved legal issues.

Kind of makes you proud of your party when they are so willing to dump the rule of law I'd bet. <g> I know you'd never condone this kind of behavior but it makes me wonder just what is really important to these folks...