A “chad” is a little piece of paper that gets punched out by a voter on a ballot to show which candidate they’re voting for.
In the presidential election of 2000, in Florida, the vote was very close, so the ballots were hand counted to be really accurate. The system used was a punch system, the ballots had holes punched in them by the name of the person that was being voted for, and then they were fed into a machine that blew air through them to detect the holes.
The problem was that a lot of the chads didn’t get completely removed by the hole puncher, and were hanging on by a bit. So the expressions quickly grew of hanging, dangling and flopping chads. Comedians had a great time with that, making lots of jokes about them, with plenty of sexual references.
Today we have voting machines that are built in China that count our votes and they can be programmed to favor one candidate over another. We have gone from technology that made it difficult to count votes, to technology that makes fair elections impossible. The only right way to count votes is by hand.
This reminds me of NASA’s effort to make a ball point pen that would write in zero gravity, and they spent a huge amount of money on the problem, while the Russians solved it by using pencils.
The last paragraph closes this articles with a golden key: perfect illustration of how stupid and mediocre can be the government.
Please, post tomorrow your analysis about the results of these elections.
Who won and who loses.