Word: problems
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...heart of the fight was those confusing Palm Beach ballots. Some 19,000 had been thrown out because voters had punched two holes for President; an additional 10,000 did not register any presidential choice. Hearing about the ballot's design problem, other voters in the county became convinced on Wednesday that they had accidentally voted for Buchanan, whose total of 3,407 votes in the county was three times as high as in neighboring counties with different-style ballots. Buchanan, never one to miss a chance to stir hot soup if it could spill on someone named Bush, went...
...getting under way, Democrats noticed that in other counties with punch ballots, a disproportionate number had no votes for President. In Broward alone, which gave Gore 68% of its vote, there were 6,686 ballots that did not register a presidential vote. In Pinellas, election authorities figured out this problem and began removing the little hanging flap from the punch cards, although they didn't catch all the faulty ballots before the full recount was completed. Nonetheless, Gore picked up 417 votes there, and now it became important for Democrats to press for a hand count...
...vote cushion. Bush staff members knew Dade and Broward counties still hadn't reported, but their models told them they had a lead that was insurmountable. The margin would shrink, but then "it was just a matter of hanging on to the cliff by our fingers," remembers McKinnon. The problem is "each finger kept getting stepped on." He and Ferguson nipped out for a little tequila to calm their nerves. Rove, who was wearing his phone headset all evening, was calling a statistics professor in Texas for his analysis of how the numbers were running, and then yelling...
Some news veterans blame the blunders on competition. "Making the first call is all a question of network ego," says Martin Plissner, former executive political director of CBS News. "It's a question of whose is bigger." Another problem is noncompetition. Networks share VNS data and then hire analysts, who race to crunch the same numbers. Competing operations might have more incentive to avoid errors--or at least wouldn't multiply them...
...Europeans think they have a problem with Washington, the OPEC countries may spring some nasty surprises. After all, for all the talk of win-win solutions in pioneering new technologies in the developing world, the losers in any move to cut back on fossil fuel consumption are inevitably going to be oil-producing countries. Nigeria has demanded financial compensation for oil-producing nations as part of any agreement to cut reliance on their leading export. And we all know how easily they can make their displeasure felt in an industrialized world still mostly dependent on their product...