posted on December 9, 2000 08:19:56 AM
Here's my question. Feel free to correct any statements I make - this is the way I understand it but it "doesn't add up" so obviously I'm missing something. All numbers are rounded off. Let's just stick to Seminole for this right now.
There were a total of 15,000 absentee ballots in Seminole.
Therefore, there were *in excess* of 15,000 absentee ballot *applications* in Seminole (since not all applications actually resulted in ballots being cast).
Bush received 10,000 of the ballots actually cast and Gore received 5,000.
The Republican party 'corrected' about 2,200 ballot applications that had been sent to Republicans and returned with incorrect/missing information.
(This was not the voters fault, the problem was in the original application sent to them to be filled out and returned.)
Approx. 1,900 (of these 2,200) actually resulted in ballots being cast (presumably for Bush but no one knows for sure).
So, 10,000 total absentee ballots were cast for Bush of which 1,900 had been corrected. That leaves 8,100 that weren't corrected yet were cast for Bush. Did these 8,100 ballot applications not contain the infamous printer error? Or did they contain the error but the voter fixed it themselves?
(By the way, I don't think these votes should have been disqualified.)
posted on December 9, 2000 01:35:50 PM
The Republican Party, as well as the Democratic Party, did mass mailings to people registered for their respective parties encouraging them to vote via absentee ballot. However the mailing only represented a fraction of the absentee ballot requests. Many people requested them themselves (myself included). So your remaining absentee ballot requests were initiated by the voters themselves.
