>Four percent is hardly massive - enough to warrant an examination of what happened, perhaps, but again, this needs to be stated in comparison with other large counties using paper ballots.

The blame now seems to be reasonably explained, from various interviews, ballot, & machine examinations on the news this weekend. The "butterflies" generally worked well enough in Palm Beach, that is why not everyone complained - but some few machines were seriously out of alignment with the ballots inserted, resulting in the Buchanan hole appearing as much as 10mm lower (a lot, and deep into the "Gore" punch region) on these few machines. But these few bad machines were used all day in most cases, despite some voter complaints; some "wiser" voters interviewed just went to a different machine to vote, without further trouble.

There were not a great many of these bad machines, but enough to cause very public mischief. So, my ultimate guess is that some of these complaining people had a fairly legitimate gripe, while some are just bozos whining for being hasty/foolish about picking spot #2 without thinking or reading. But it's awfully hard to discern which voter error is of which type, and what to do about it (except to prevent it from occurring again).