George,

In Chesterfield we use the punch ballots (with chads and all the rest!) but not butterfly ballots.

On Friday I talked with Jack Clifford, our Democratic voting official on the county board, to ask how many unread ballots we typically have. He says that there are usually fewer than 5 per precinct and that the counting machine Chesterfield uses will read the "pregnant chads", "hanging chads", etc. He reminded me that Virginia had looked very carefully at the chads during the Wilder recount and had not had significant numbers of misread or unread ballots.

Jack feels that the difference is in the vote-counting machines because, he says, that Florida uses centralized high-speed machines, whereas in Chesterfield we have a counter in each precinct that counts slower as each voter deposits a ballot and leaves the precinct. He wonders if the terrific speed causes the machine to throw out any ballot that does not have exact centering of the punch configuration, etc.

So, under these circumstances, would we call this a machine error equivalent to "human error" that is being claimed for manual counting??

Marjorie Clark (electronic mail, November 18, 2000).