Chad

The presidential election of 2000 introduced a new word to the political lexicon: chad. In a punch card system of recording votes, chad is the paper that voters punch out of ballots to indicate their preferences for candidates or ballot questions. According to the Federal Election Commission, some variation of the punch card system was used by 37.3 percent of registered voters in the United States in the 1996 presidential election. (See Voting machine.)

Reuters

Although it was unfamiliar to most Americans, chad itself was not new. Merriam Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1993 edition, defined chad as “small pieces of paper or cardboard produced in punching paper tape or data cards.” Of unknown origin, its use began in 1947, the dictionary said.

Punch cards date from the late eighteenth century. Herman Hollerith, an inventor and statistician, [Page p75]invented the punch card in the late 1880s to record and store data and the tabulating machine to read the cards. It was first put to use in the census of 1890 and was soon in widespread use. Hollerith would later found International Business Machines (IBM).

Although increasingly being replaced by touch-sensitive computers and magnetic storage devices, punch cards were still common in voting in 2002. Voters slide their paper ballot into a special holder and punch holes in the ballot that correspond to their selections using a device called a stylus, which is supplied by election officials. Afterward, the ballot is fed into a device that registers the voter's preferences by the light shining through the holes.

If, however, the voter fails for whatever reason to fully detach the chad from the ballot, light will not shine through, and the preferences will not be recorded. If two chads corresponding to two candidates for the same office are inadvertently detached, the ballot will likewise be spoiled. In any given election, a small number of spoiled ballots is common and expected. But when an election is close, those ballots can be a source of contention.

The 2000 presidential election in Florida presented just such a scenario. On election day, Texas governor George W. Bush led the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, by a slim 1,725 votes. A subsequent machine recount reduced the Bush lead to 930 votes, and the Democrats sought hand recounts of the ballots in several jurisdictions that had utilized punch card systems. The Democrats sought to have the chad examined to determine if a voter preference could be discerned from the condition of the chad. That gave rise to a number of arcane terms to describe chad in various states of detachment. A chad attached on all four corners but showing some bulging was said to be “pregnant” or “dimpled.” If one corner was detached, it was called a “hanging-door chad”; two detached, a “swinging-door chad”; and three detached, a “tri-corner chad.” Democrats argued that all four types of chad indicated an intention to vote for a given candidate, but Republicans argued that any of the above could have been caused by handling the ballots. Elections officials in the various locales were accused of using different criteria in evaluating the chad during the hand recounts, leading to charges of an inconsistent and therefore unfair process. All of these charges and countercharges formed the basis of numerous court challenges that were mooted December 12, 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Bush v. Gore, effectively ending the disputed election.

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