Florida bans punch-card ballots
Chads - now a thing of the past
The American state of Florida has banned the use of the punch-card voting machines that led to a prolonged dispute over the outcome of last November's presidential election.
Instead of using styluses to punch through holes in their ballot papers, future voters will use pencils to fill in boxes.
Both houses of the Florida legislature voted overwhelmingly to spend more than $30m on optical scanners to read the ballots.
Gov. Bush was pleased at the vote
Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who is President George W Bush's brother, has said he may sign the bill into law as early as next week.
He said the new machines would provide the whole state with a single standard and make any recounting much easier.
The new system should be in place by next year - prompting Republican representative Johnny Byrd to say that the vote of the people, rather than lawsuits, would determine the outcome of gubernatorial elections in 2002.
Recount provisions
The state's election supervisors were pleased with the measure.
"I am just thrilled to death over what they've accomplished," said Volusia County supervisor Deanie Lowe.
The new legislation also includes clear provisions for machine and manual recounts during close election races.
Thousands of uncounted votes were thrown out
These rules would take voter intent into account, and there would be a standard on oddly marked ballots.
There were fierce arguments during the election about whether to count ballots whose chads - the small rectangles punched out from voting cards - had managed to cling on by one or more of the cardboard slivers connecting them to the card.
Right to vote 'lost'
George W Bush was eventually handed victory in the White House race by the Federal Supreme Court, after weeks of recounts and legal wrangling over the extremely close result in Florida.
But some voters and civil rights groups have argued that blacks and others in the state were systematically and deliberately deprived of their right to vote.
America was divided over the recounts
The punch-card ballots
were blamed for many
of the irregularities,
with tens of thousands
of uncounted votes
thrown out by decrepit
voting machines.
Many of the machines were in predominantly black voting areas, where support for President Bush's Democrat challenger Al Gore was high.
Some independent recounts of the votes have indicated that Mr Gore won, although other surveys suggested Mr Bush would still have been the winner.
The final tally of votes gave Mr Bush the state
by just 537 votes.
-- Anonymous, May 05, 2001