Hi all

For the first time, Orange County (Orlando) had problems - but it appears to be totally the printer's fault - the company - a local one who's been printing ballots for 20 years forgot to add a perferation to many of the ballots that are bound together in pad form. The poll workers had to tear them off and some messed up the verification bar code, causing them to not work in the scantron machines.

oops...

What needs to happen is that either election day needs to be a school holiday (or moved to Saturday), voting places should be in schools and teachers should staff the polls. I was in charge in 1994 of both choosing poll sites and hireing & training over 1000 poll workers for Orange County. Most of the poll workers are elderly and we had to work very hard to teach them to understand how to use the simplest of computers (Scantron machines like those used to grade the SAT and other standardized tests). Most of the elderly workers had never used a computer - even an ATM. Hell, most of them couldn't fill out their own absentee ballot correctly.

I can't imagine the learning curve for these people in working the touch-screen computers.

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That's being said, the voting practices in several counties are racist and Republican-biased.

But remember, regarding Florida "losing" Gore the election. He would not have needed to win Florida if only he had won his own HOME STATE!

pax yall