"Chad" is the formerly-affectionate term for the little piece of paper that gets punched out of the ballot when a properly trained voter operates a fully-functional Votomatic voting machine.

Ever eager to educate - you and ourselves - we have obtained the output from three of these machines, used in the recent special election in Charlottesville. Since, as we have learned to our dismay, accuracy has not always been paramount in the voting process, we thought it would be helpful to obtain an accurate estimate of the number of chads in our collection. This will provide us with data useful in setting up a hand count (notoriously prone to error).

Our ongoing chad-guessing contest will culminate in a counting ceremony and awards presentation - date, time and location to be announced.

Each of our chads is a teeny rectangle about 1.5 x 3.0 mm., on thick paper - about the size of a grain of Uncle Ben's Short Grain rice, if you boil it thoroughly and let a 2 year old mush it around for a while.

To get a firm scientific grounding for this project, we enlisted the aid of our friends at Simpson Weather Associates. They are in the habit of weighing things like coal dust particles, as part of their pollution-control-consulting business, so we figured that chads should be light work for them.

Dave Emmitt, President and Senior Scientist of SWA (and Research Associate Professor in the UVa Environmental Sciences Department) designed the methodology and performed the weighings. He used a Sartorius Digital Pan Balance Model BA 1105, which reads to 0.00001 gram. The balance was tared (the readout set to 0) with a flat card big enough for our chad prelims.

From the pouch of chads, ten were selected at random and carefully weighed. Dividing by ten, we got a first estimate - that each chad weighs just a bit less than 0.0009 grams (about 3,500 of them would weigh as much as a penny).

Dr. Emmitt then carefully selected 20 chads. The selection was made on the assumption that the 20 easiest to reach were not much different from all their brothers and sisters in the heap. The 20 were weighed, and the weight divided by 20. The number agreed so closely with the first number that we all thought we must have made a mistake of some kind.

However, rather than re-evaluating the experimental procedure, the decision was made to persist. Another 20 were selected, weighed, the per-each weight determined, and when we checked with the two previous runs, we found that there was agreement well within a tenth of a chad!

Now for the main event. A larger, clean, scientifically correct card is found (the Papa John's logo placed face-down), and the balance re-tared and the contents of the pouch carefully poured to form a conical mound about 10 cm. in diameter and 2 cm. high. The card is lowered into the balance chamber (a three-guppy size aquarium), and we wait for the reading to stabilize.

Emmit records the reading. Mathematical operations, understood by us, will, when performed, yield a figure that is the approximate number of chads in the pouch. It may in fact be the actual number of chads in the pouch, but owing to errors inherent in any counting process, we will probably never know. (Dave Sagarin, May 6, 2002)