h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: A Brief History of Voting Procedures in the United States - Rum and Pregnant Chads - A87997702
Author: Dmitri Gheorgheni - Not Banned in China - U1590784

Find out about George Washington's electoral liquor bill, and his friend's bad spelling.

Also learn about pregnant chads.

I figured we should be ready for the November election.

Excellent! Particularly the concluding line

I found a couple more links - this Entry complements them nicely

Voting in the United States A1304993

Election and Voting Methods A1905158

Thank you, included!

I also updated Washington's bar bill. I'd got that wrong, due to misreading the government archives' footnotes. The whole 40 pounds was for a much larger quantity of beverages, so I changed the list to reflect that.

So what exactly is the difference between a chad that is hung, dimpled or pregnant? And how can you sue it for being dead and/or not voting for you?

<BB<

Was that a real question, or just an attempt at a joke?

The first bit is a real question. I see that a hanging chad is a piece of paper where the hole fails to fall out and hangs on. But what is difference between a pregnant or dimpled chad? With my hole-punching experience I can picture that one might be where instead of creating a hole a circular bump is created - but is that a pregnancy or a dimple?

I looked it up and saw that a '#2 pencil' is really a HB.

<BB<

I get the point and write footnotes.

I added a footnote delineating types of chads. I imagine there might be other readers with that level of interest, although I suspect they're off their medication. I've never used this voting system, so I've always imagined its being like this test we took in school once, where we had to use a stylus similar to a Braille stylus to poke through a selection.

The 'Votomatic' (not making this up!) looks much, much worse. It looks like something the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation came up with.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Votomatic.jpg

I also added a footnote about #2 pencils. I even added one of those irrelevant links we love so much. I grew up in an engineering household, and had no idea pencil-numbering wasn't international. Now I know something. (My dad once insisted my physics homework was all wrong. After two solid hours of recalculation, he suddenly realised we were *using the METRIC system*... at uni, he drew a scale map of the solar system in feet and inches...)

Thank you for the footnotes - I also wondered about the different chads in relation to my hole-punching experience, so that clarifies it

I read the link about the 2000 election and see the chads weren’t mentioned - did the hanging chad mean the computer couldn’t read the ballot paper, do you know?

Oh, yes.

I think you may find this extremely thorough explanation of the chad issues with Votomatic machines enlightening.

http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/chad.html

On the other hand, I feel I should warn you that reading it may cause nosebleed.

Considering pregnant chads were mentioned in the title, in the body of the text and as the very last word of the conclusion it seemed an oversight not to say what made a pregnant chad unique?

<BB<

You're right. It's now been almost 20 years since the fateful time when everyone in the US had the words 'pregnant chad' seared into their memories.

That link is extremely thorough and also enlightening indeed - so the hanging chads were a problem in manual checking of votes, that they might slot back into the hole and make it look as though no vote had been cast for that candidate

Since you liked it, I added the link to the footnote.

Nicely linked - thank you

The chads were famous in UK news in 2000, too, but I didn’t understand the significance of them (I didn’t even know they were rectangular!), so this Entry is very useful

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