TAPING OF CHADS OVER BALLOT HOLES THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN COUNTED FOR GEORGE BUSH, MORE CHADS FALL OUT, PAPERS THAT WERE NOT ABLE TO BE DISLODGED BY A SHARP STYLUS ON ELECTION DAY

LETTER-TO-EDITOR

Dear Editor: Of any newspaper in the country that wants truth

Don't forget for one moment the chronological developments in Florida which initially began when we awakened on Wednesday, November 8, 2000 to news reports that perhaps "hundreds" of Palm Beach County voters may have picked the wrong candidate because of a ballot layout. After the statewide machine recount, Buchanan ended up with 3,411 votes in Palm Beach County, four more than he got in the first tally, according to reporting on worldnetdaily.com.

Almost simultaneously, we learned that some 19,000 plus double-punched Palm Beach County election-day ballots, overvotes, had to be discarded and left untallied. Across the state, these overvotes remain untallied by law.

Days later, we were aghast at the possibility that thousands of Broward voters, presumably Democratic senior citizens, did not apply enough pressure on the ballot punch card to record their votes.

Since then, the focus has turned from overvotes for two presidential candidates on the same ballot and alleged misvotes for Buchanan to what are called undervotes.

Are we really this stupid?

In the overvote cases the stylus worked to perfection and the voter obviously maintained a strong and steady-hand powerful enough to enable the hole punch machine to do double duty.

In the alleged misvotes for Buchanan we are led to believe that the stylus worked to perfection and punched out more votes for Buchanan than can be statistically possible in the democratic stronghold of Palm Beach County.

Are we, the people of the rest of the U.S. really so gullible?

Since the hand recounts began, guess what has been happening. Chads, the bits of paper never before loosened from a ballot card by the sharp stylus on a punch-hole machine, are now just happenstance falling to the floor. 78 of them. 200 of them, and in Miami Dade thousands of them.

In one county, during the hand recount, reports showed that Bush had lost 120 plus votes. In a Tuesday November 21 noon Fox News report, an anchor shows a visual for Broward County tallies while the hand-counting is ongoing. In precinct 162 E, the first hand recount shows Gore votes increased to 1103. In the same precinct, the second hand recount shows Gore votes decreased to to 1092.

It's obvious what has been happening. Some of these ballots are altered from their original condition. Chads that were not dislodged before are now falling out happenstance, making ballots previously counted by machine, now overvoted! Overvotes must be discarded.

This is a travesty to the civil rights of all of the voters who voted with care on Election Day. Despite having to flip pages on an overlay, and follow arrows to numbered candidate punchholes, hundreds of thousands of voters in Palm Beach County managed to vote for only one candidate for president. In these few counties where these ballots were counted once by machine, and twice by machine during an automatic machine recount, hundreds of votes made it through the second machine count intact.

However, now, hundreds of one-man one-vote legitimate ballots may have to be thrown out because ballots now have two hole punches for president. Worse, unless someone does some massive after-the-fact investigation, we will never know how many distorted ballots may result from this, since nobody has bothered to determine how many actual-real-alive-registered voters even voted on Election Day in these counties.

One thing is clear: this travesty of deceit is for one purpose: to gain Gore-in-Cheat one more vote than George W. Bush.