Thanks Ebbie. That's what I like about he Mudcat, you ask a question, and across the other side of the planet someone finds the answer. It's a bit like that chaotic butterfly they're always talking about - flaps his wings and there's a hurricane in anther continent.

"The optical scanner counts the write-in votes." Yes, but they don't seem to have optical scanners in Florida, and they don't seem to like manual counts either, so the write-in puzzle remains. I suppose you could do a rapid manual flip through to identify the ballot paper with write-in votes, and that'd only take a couple of hours, the same time it takes to count the votes in an election over here. Maybe they do it that way, thoigh nodody has mentioned it.

Because if they don't I can't see how they can know how many of the votes are invalidated by people doing a write-in as well as a poke-in.