In the
last Presidential Election, a group of 100K+ (as opposed to 60K+
undervoted) ballots that have so far not been counted. Well, at least in the
Democrat's sense of
counted. One might ask, why the hell should we manually count the
overvote? If some
moron managed to punch votes for both
Gore and
Bucanan why should we go back and try to
divine the will of the voter? Well, we shouldn't. I'm pretty sure there is no reason to hand count overvotes in a
county with a
punch card ballot. BUT, there is a perfectly good reason to manually count overvotes in counties with
Optical Ballots. Anyone who's been in school for the last,
I don't know, 20 years, will be familiar with these. They are basically
scantron cards. It's quite possible that
John Q. Bush supporter could nicely bubble in his vote, but by accident make a mark in the Gore bubble. It's possible that this will register as a vote for both candidates and not get counted. Now, it's completely obvious who the person really voted for if someone were to look at the ballot. In fact, it's much more obvious than a
dimpled chad.
So, don't believe the Democrats when they try to claim that counting all of the undervotes across Florida will yield a complete count. It simply isn't true. If the news media would grasp this concept and take a look at where these Optical Ballots are they would most likely find they are in Republican counties.
The only fair and complete count would be a hand count of all the ballots in all the counties in Florida.
Update: Now that two news organizations have performed recounts of the undervotes we now know that Gore wouldn't have gained near enough votes to win even if they were counted. Given that, and the likelihood of Bush gaining votes from the overvote, if a full count were ever done Bush would come out way ahead.
This node was originally at overvote but moved at the request of an editor.