I truly
began to appreciate the pettiness (or should that be "
need for accuracy") of this whole thing after reading the
Sunday Times this week. One article stated that
Republicans in
Palm Beach County were complaining that a
Democrat at the polling-booth had, crime upon crimes, eaten some
chad. The general tone of the write-up suggested that this was roughly on a par with
eating a baby.
I was having trouble
keeping a straight face at this point, but the paper fearlessly dead-panned onwards, featuring an
eye-witness account from a Republican. This is almost certainly a
paraphrase, but it was on the lines of:
"I was standing next to the
booth, and this man came along and
distinctly licked his finger and stuck it in the chad, then stuck it in his mouth. There were maybe
twenty, thirty pieces stuck to it. I said 'Please don't sir, we're trying to keep them all together.'"
I can see this becoming a new
electoral tactic in future ballots of dubious morality. Men casually breezing past chad-bins,
surreptitiously dropping in families of gerbils to subvert the vote.