Funny, funny, funny!

Forcing people to use a butterfly ballot every day might be the best way to teach them how it works! Apparently the folks at Amazon think so!

Phil Agre, of the Red Rock Eater mailing list, has put out a list of 13 myths about the election with enough links and urls to ensure that you don't get any real work done today.

It does a great job of clearing up some F.U.D. that's been flying around the last few days.

Tired of reading about election disputes? Impatient for me to put up Cameo pictures? (and who isn't?) While you're waiting, check out Enlightenment With A Vengance.

Quit your job, buy back your soul (and a car) and crisscross the country with a digital camera, witty prose, the open road and an open mind. This site is breathtaking not only for the experiences it shares, but for the sheer dedication that goes into it. This is the kind of thing I aspire to do with my sites, and my life.

Bob Spence, having acquired the actual numbers and types of doublepunched ballots in the four hand-counted precincts, has assembled an analysis of doublepunching patterns in Palm Beach.

It's fascinating, and a bit unexpected (at least in my own opinion). The report goes into sufficient detail, but the gist is that the vast majority of doublepunched ballots were not people who voted for Buchanan and Gore, which would be the expected result if people confused Buchanan's punch-hole for Gore's, then realized their mistake and punched Gore's. the most common errors were people who voted for both Bush and Buchanan or Gore and McReynolds. This pattern of error clearly points to one of the other postulates for multiple punches: the conclusion that the voter was supposed to punch holes for both the presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

I could detail this cognitive error, fostered and supported both by the layout and the textual instructions on the ballot, but the Slate story mentioned here a few days ago does amuch better job of this.

More interesting ammunition for this week's political theatre (pun intended), the legal battles.

---

Update (11/13): Bob has updated the numbers in his report. It turns out that the most common mistake (80 ballots) was for Buchanan and Gore, with Gore/McReynolds and Bush/Buchanan coming in second and third respectively. His page has been updated.

This is an amazing story. Printed in the New York Daily News on November 1st, a week before the election, it quotes a Bush aide saying that if Bush lost the electoral vote but won the popular vote, they would fight, mounting a campaign to sway the decision of the members of the Electoral College to vote for 'the will of the people'.

It's staggering how much the tables turn when Bush has lost the popular vote, and stands a chance of winning the electoral vote he was deriding before.

I've now officially lost all respect for the actions of the Bush camp. They call for hand-recounts in New Mexico, and file injunctions to stop hand-recounts in Palm Beach. They vow to make 'the will of the people' decide the president over the Electoral College, and when they find that the will of the people is for Gore, they mount an attack to protect their Electoral College votes in direct conflict with their earlier position.

This is a race Bush wants to win, and he'll do it by any means necessary, sacrificing the people and sacrificing consistency of position. The only way the nation will pull through this is if the system is respected, and that system encompasses the election system, the judicial system, and all the rest. Nobody wants to see a judge pick the president, but if it comes down to that, via the system, then it's better than changing the system because we don't like where it leads.

The irony of the whole situation is that we have a far better picture of who Al Gore and G W Bush really are after seeing how they handle a week of personal strife than we did watching a year of campaigning and canned speeches written by staffers.

Maybe a nationwide revote isn't such a bad idea. The whole purpose of the Electoral College was to protect the Presidency from an uninformed populace. It seems that there's never been a time that the populace has been better informed than now...

I'm working on another telling visualization of the ballot data, when I had a thought: With so many confused voters, it's likely that at least a handful opted to write in their candidate instead of risking making an incorrect vote.

If someone voted for Gore as a write-in, would that have been tabulated yet? With all we're hearing about machine-counting and the reluctance to hand-count, I would guess the answer is no.

This would seem to affect all ballots in close elections. I wonder what the regulation is if someone submits a write-in for someone who is actually on the ballot?

For those of you looking for the visual interpretations of the Palm Beach ballot, they're here. (Just saying it again because that link is being pushed to the bottom of the page.)

Five researchers at Harvard University have put together a very compelling report on the high Buchanan count in Palm Beach, includng a precinct-level analysis of several factors including discarded ballots. This is the best report I've read yet.

One of the big topics, and the only thing Bush and Gore agree on, is that the election results can't be final until the overseas absentee ballots come in and are counted. again and again we hear about the magic ten days from election day in which these ballots may arrive and be counted, but what is their current status?

Obviously some of these ballots, in all likelyhood a significant majority of them, have already arrived and only a trickle should still be coming in for the next 6 days. Have the ballots that have already arrived been incorporated into the Florida vote tallies? It's clear that there are enough of them to swing more than 350 votes, and that this alone should stop anyone from declaring a victory, ballot irregularities and court cases or no.

Does anyone know if the current totals bouncing around on TV include any overseas ballots, or are they waiting until they're all in, counting them all at once, then laying down the bombshell news?

It's amazing how the TV and interactive networks focus on the active dramas, and gloss over the news which may be more sognificant, just because it doesn't have screaming emotional people behind it.