Disclaimer: I support Bush. I don't think the relative merits of the candidates is on-topic for this group. However, the mechanics of a presidential election involve a lot of quiz fodder. More to the point, there are some fantastically well-informed people here. When I went to vote yesterday (8:45 a.m. PST), my polling place had neither voting booths(!) nor a machine into which to feed the paper ballots. We filled out ballots using the tops of trash cans, the walls, or whatever hard surface we could find to support the ballot sheets. We deposited our ballots into a Gap-sized paper sack, over which a high school girl in a volleyball t-shirt kept vigil. Is this ideal? No. Am I confident that my vote got counted? Gosh no. Did this affect anything? Given that it's California, almost certainly not. (The only demographic I know about my precinct is that it's heavily Asian. I suspect it leans Democratic but am not sure.) Bottom line, while our elections are far better run than those in other places in the world, there's still a lot of logistics to be learned. Human beings in general are lousy with logistics: Any quiz tournament proves it. I find it very unfortunate that random doofishness might affect the outcome, but am quite skeptical of both the claims and the motives of people who claim fraud. For what it's I made a bet with a friend, at 10-to-1 odds, that the Florida results indeed would NOT affect who won the election. Whether this a good bet depends in large part on the size of the U.S. military overseas (many absentee ballots are military and 90% of those are GOP-reliable) and the degree to which Iowa and Wisconsin had already tallied absentees last night. Matt
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