THEFIGHTOFTHECENTURY

                                                                                                                  November 7,2000

(AP) - Associated Press - Las Vegas, NV

    There is a new heavyweight in town! The battlelines have been drawn and the heavyweights
of the world have come together to deffend their title.

    The Democrats and Republicans are trying not to show their anxieties and they seem to be doing well. Each of them seem to thrive under the pressure and are both confident they will be the next president of the United States of America.

'Contraband' Chad
Found in Broward

Thursday, November 16, 2000

By ALAN CLENDENNING
Associated Press Writer
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) - Chads: Votes or trash?
When the Broward County canvassing board showed up for work Thursday morning, waiting on its table was a manila police envelope emblazoned with the words: ``Crime. Found Property.'' Inside: 78 ``chads.''
The chads, bits of paper punched out of a ballot when a vote is cast, were found on the floor in the room where a hand recount of presidential ballots began Wednesday. Republicans demanded that deputies sweep them up and take them into custody as evidence of possible vote tampering.
County Elections Supervisor Jane Carroll, a Republican member of the canvassing board, was unimpressed by the package. She said it was unlikely that all 78 of the chads fell out of spaces for the presidential race, and denied evidence of a conspiracy.
``We go with the saying, `Let the chads fall as they may,''' she said. ``Chads are not partisan.''
Others in her party were taking the matter seriously.
``The more these punch cards are handled, the more errors we see,'' Bush campaign chairman Don Evans said in Austin, Texas, speaking of Broward County. ``How can a manual recount be accurate when the ballots themselves are changing before our very eyes?
When a GOP observer saw the paper bits being pushed off tables and onto the floor, he alerted deputies and had them collected. The party then drafted an affidavit with the canvassing board about the matter.
County GOP Chairman Ed Pozzuoli renewed a request for the board to suspend its hand count.
``It's clear that we cannot get an accurate count because these chads are falling all over,'' he said. ``There's dead chads laying on the tables over there, and we can't figure out where they're from.''
``You don't need to beat a dead horse,'' Canvassing Board Chairman Robert W. Lee said in response. ``And it gets to a point where it's insulting.''
The envelope was in the possession of a deputy overnight. Representatives from the Democratic and Republican parties joined two deputies camping out in a sealed room with the ballots.
County Attorney Norman Ostrau, who has been present throughout the recount, said the chad argument ``would not be a sustained legal challenge, in my view.''
``If they were loose chads, it was very, very, very, very, very likely they were counted,'' he said.

Chad Rules in Florida

Wednesday, November 15, 2000

By The Associated Press
The question of what kind of ``chad'' constitutes a vote is up in the air again in Florida.
Officials in Palm Beach County - after a sometimes silly, but ultimately serious debate - arrived at rules about how much of the paper divot had to be poked out of a punch ballot for a vote to count. But the Florida Democratic Party has filed a lawsuit in circuit court in West Palm Beach to change the rules.
These were the five types of chad recognized in the county. The first three, which are counted as votes, were:
- Hanging door chad, where one corner is attached.
- Swinging door chad, with two corners attached.
- Tri chad, which has three corners attached.
The others, which are not counted, were:
- Pregnant chad, which bulges but doesn't punch through.
- Dimple chad, where there is an indentation but no perforation.
The Democrats have asked a judge to declare that dimpled chad are valid.
The so-called chad test was approved in 1990 by the Palm Beach County canvassing board. It says that a chad ``hanging or partially punched may be counted as a vote, since it is possible to punch through the card and still not totally dislodge the chad,'' explained county spokesman Bob Nichols.

'Hanging Chad' Could Hold Key to Election?

Tuesday, November 14, 2000

MIAMI (Reuters) - The humble and hitherto relatively unknown "hanging chad" has a pivotal role in the drama to choose the next president of the United States.

"A rock band? The title of Carl Hiaasen's new novel? A country in Africa? ... A kid at the mall?" asked one writer in the Miami Herald newspaper.

Actually, it's election worker jargon for the dangling bits of cardboard produced when voters fail to punch out holes completely in punch card ballots, making the cardboard ballot unreadable by counting machines.

Peering through a ballot card and holding it up to the light for a "sunshine test," elections workers in Florida's counties involved in the laborious business of hand recounting votes have to decide on the status of the "chad."

"Dimpled chads" or "pregnant chads" are when voters punch the cards hard enough to make a dent around the punch hole but not hard enough to perforate the card.

"Penetration is the key," Bruce Rogow, attorney for the Palm Beach County election supervisor, explained. "Pregnancy does not count in Palm Beach County, only penetration."