Why did they punch twice?

As I watched the news and listened to reports, this question kept coming back to me. If, as a voter, you thought you punched the wrong hole, you would ask for a new ballot. Every ballot for President that I have ever used said "Vote for One". Why would someone intentionally invalidate their own ballot by punching a second time?

I personally don't think the ballot is that confusing. We use it in Chicago without the kind of problem they're having in Florida. But I can understand someone punching the wrong hole, even when they had seen the ballot in advance (in the paper and in the mail). Someone inadvertently voting for Buchanan is impossible to prove and must be wrung up as "too damn bad".

But I cannot understand how 19,000 people, all in a single county, all tried to fix their mistake by punching again when it's pretty common knowledge that voting twice would invalidate the ballot. The contention that 16,000 votes were similarly discounted in 1996 is also hard to understand. Did the same people make the same mistake two elections in a row and then get 3,000 of their friends to do the same thing?Unless you think that the 19,000 most confused people in the country all happen to live in the same county, you have to come to the conclusion that something else happened in Palm Beach County.

There are two ways to illegally skew a vote count: Give your own candidate more votes than he/she deserved, or eliminate votes for your opponent. I am beginning to think that votes for Al Gore in Palm Beach County were punched a second time by someone trying to invalidate those ballots.

This "second punching" could have easily been done during the time that the ballot boxes were "in transit". The polls closed at 7:00 and the votes weren't in and counted until 2:30 AM. It would have had to been done by someone without breaking the seal on the boxes, which would indicate that this was worked out according to a plan that was executed in at least the last two elections.

Although I don't see the point in whining over an election that was lost fair and square, I'm beginning to think that the fix was in. I don't think what happened in predominantly Democratic Palm Beach County was "voter confusion". I think it was vote fraud. And I'm from Chicago. We have more than a little experience with this stuff.