Clouser, a Democrat, says the Gore claim is a "red herring."

© 2000

ELECTION 2000, Day 32 Dimple theory dealt new blow Miami elections official says precincts reported no ballot-punching problems

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By Paul Sperry © 2000 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON -- In a new blow to Al Gore's claim that clogged voting equipment prevented hundreds of Miami-Dade County voters from cleanly punching the ballot for him, the county's No. 2 elections official told WorldNetDaily that his office received no reports of such voting problems on Election Day or since then.

Lawyers for Gore have argued that chad -- the little perforated squares on the ballot that count as votes when removed -- piled inside voting-booth trays to the point where they backed up against ballot punch-holes and blocked the insertion of styluses.

"I have not heard anyone complain about that, and I hear a hell of a lot of problems that go on at precincts," said John Clouser, Miami-Dade County assistant supervisor of elections.

He says he heard no such complaints despite installing about 100 extra phones at election headquarters and hiring about 100 extra workers to man them on Election Day.

He also says no clerks at the county's 578 polling places felt the need to call county maintenance workers to clean out chad trays in the vote recorders used in the Votomatic booths.

"I'm also in charge of our warehouse, and obviously, they would have gotten calls at our warehouse saying, 'Hey, we need cleaned-out Votomatics,' " Clouser said.

The only complaints about the booths involved a few burned-out fluorescent bulbs, which were replaced, he says.

Clouser, a Democrat, says the Gore claim is a "red herring."

"And of course, the press is going for it," he said.

He estimates -- based on the testimony of one of the inventors of the vote recorder, who last weekend said it would take 1 million to 1.5 million chad to block a stylus -- that it would take a minimum of 400 presidential elections to pack a tray full enough to make Gore's claim plausible.

"If you say that there were 2,500 chad per Votomatic per presidential election, we'd have to do the equivalent of 400 to 600 presidential elections in order to fill these things up," Clouser said.

"And I don't think we've had 400 to 600 presidential elections since 1977," he quipped, when the county started using the Votomatic. And that assumes the trays weren't cleaned out.

Clouser says he's never used the Votomatic to vote. He's had to vote by absentee ballot, because he can't take time out from his official duties on Election Day to vote.

So he decided to finally use the Votomatic himself, in conducting an experiment to see how hard it would be for the novice voter to punch out the chad after following the instructions in the booth.

"On Thanksgiving day, I took 20 ballot cards each with 312 positions (or perforated squares). I punched through each one of the 312 positions," he said. "That's 6,240 chad that went down into the (trays of the) vote recorders."

"I pulled all 20 cards out (of the throat of the vote recorder). Guess what? Clean as a whistle -- every single one of them. No hangers. Nothing," Clouser added. "All I did was follow the instructions."

Gore, who is contesting President-elect George W. Bush's certified 537-vote Florida win, wants some 9,000 undervoted ballots in Miami-Dade County checked by hand for indentations, or "dimples," in the chad next to his name.

He insists that hundreds, if not thousands, of voters meant to vote for him, but failed to punch through the ballot and register a hole that would be picked up by the counting machine.

The Florida Supreme Court is deliberating over whether to uphold or overturn a lower-court decision to block a hand recount of the ballots there.

The court earlier had allowed a hand recount after Gore protested the election results. But Miami-Dade, seeing it couldn't meet the court-imposed deadline, stopped its recount after looking at just some of the total 10,750 ballots with no votes for president.

Clouser says the blank votes usually are not a mistake, or oversight, but a form of protest by voters.

"Take my sister-in-law in California, for example. She told me, 'John, I don't like either of these people, so I said to heck with it and didn't vote for president,' "he said. "She consciously made that decision."

Some voters also may have decided to skip the top race because they were overwhelmed by the unusually thick field of presidential candidates. Florida listed 10 names on its ballot -- the most of any state.

Clouser says that if Gore is allowed to inspect the ballots by hand, the officials doing the inspecting should not find any indentations that shouldn't be there.

He says he kept a tight chain of custody over the ballots, starting with their storage in the warehouse. The ballots are now in the custody of the circuit court in Tallahassee, Fla.

"They have been under a legal chain of custody. That is, we've had police officers here around the clock," Clouser said. "That has cost taxpayers $2,500 per day for about 30 days."

He also says he inspected the ballots for flaws several weeks before they were sent out to the precincts.

"We have someone go to the warehouse and check the condition of the ballot cards before we distribute them," he said, "so that we don't have any surprises on election night."

The warehouse inspector, who "has two engineering degrees," has worked for the county 25 years, he said.

Clouser adds that the warehouse is climate-controlled to protect the cards from warping or buckling from the Miami humidity.

"They were kept in an air-conditioned, locked room," he said.

Clouser says the process of printing the cards does not create any dimpling.

"We've never had a problem with dimples or the quality of the chad on the ballot cards after we've gotten them from the printers," he said.

Miami-Dade contracts with Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems & Software Inc. to print its ballot cards. The company prints them at a plant in Addison, Texas.

Clouser, who's in charge of procuring voting equipment, says he's looking at newer systems, such as optical-scanned paper balloting, to replace the Votomatic, even though he says it's worked fine -- at least until Gore's legal team made a fuss.

"The punch-card system has worked pretty well for us for 23 years," he said.

-- Anonymous, December 08, 2000