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Highlands Today
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Remember Hanging Chads?
Jasmina Meyer/Highlands Today
Joe Campbell, Supervisor of Elections, shows an array of November 7, 2000 official ballots from a general presidential election in Palm Beach County and Highlands County including George W. Bush and Al Gore.
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Published: May 19, 2008
SEBRING — It happened in Broward, Dade and Palm Beach counties.
But Joe Campbell made a different decision, so the intense media scrutiny wasn't focused on Highlands County after the 2000 presidential election.
"Our presidential ballot was printed on one page," said Campbell, supervisor of elections in Highlands County. He held up a copy of the Palm Beach County ballot, signed by the election board officials there.
But his Palm Beach counterpart chose a butterfly ballot, where the names of the 10 presidential candidates and their nominees for vice president were printed on two ballots.
Eight years ago, voters in Highlands and Palm Beach used a steel pencil to punch out a rectangular chad beside the name of the candidate the voted for. On a one-page ballot, the method was fairly straightforward.
On a butterfly ballot, the voter had to read both sides of the page, follow the arrow to the center of the ballot, insert the steel stylus in the correct slot, punch, remove the ballot, and make sure the chad had been completely removed.
"People got confused," said Campbell.
When a voter punches two holes for the same candidate, it's called an overvote. When a chad was dented but not detached, it was dimpled. A pregnant chad, said Campbell, was more heavily dented. "It was like a belly."
Should dimpled chads count? Or must a chad be hanging to determine the intent of the voter? Should the same standards be used in all 67 Florida counties?
The Palm Beach Post found 1,631 people punched Bush and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, whose hole was below Bush on the ballot. But Gore was the bigger loser: 2,908 voters punched Gore and Socialist David McReynolds, whose hole appeared just below Gore's. Another 5,330 Palm Beach County residents punched chads for Gore and Buchanan. The chad for Buchanan was just above Gore's.
The overvoted ballots were invalidated, and the bottom line is that Gore lost 6,607 more votes than Gore, the newspaper found.
George Bush beat Al Gore by 543 votes in Florida, and Bush won Florida's 25 electoral votes.
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