Presidential Election Trials: 2000

Saturday, December 2

Back in Florida, before Leon County Circuit Court judge N. Sanders Sauls, Gore attorneys urged the judge to order the hand counting of some 14,000 ballots that were considered "undervoted" or disqualified. Over nine grueling hours, they presented only two witnesses: an expert on voting machines, and a statistician. Judge Sauls plowed through lengthy and detailed descriptions of how chads do or don't become dimpled, how they may build up in the voting apparatus so they block a hole from being entirely punched from a ballot, how they can "hang" by one or more corners. Bush attorney Philip Beck crossexamined the statistician, Yale professor Nicolas Hengartner, who testified on the likely problems in punch-card voting. Beck's persistence brought an admission from the professor that he had not, in fact, examined a certain ballot that, in his affidavit, he said he had inspected.

Sunday, December 3

The slow-moving testimony in the Sauls courtroom sped up. For an hour, Bush witness John Ahmann, who some 35 years earlier helped design the punchcard system still used in several Florida counties and across the United States, spent more than an hour explaining why ballots that were only partly punched did not result from failures of the machines. "I seriously doubt," he said, "that a voter would be unable to push a chad through on a normal voting device."

In cross-examination, Gore attorney Stephen Zack read from a patent application filed by Ahmann for a new voting-machine design. It said that the old design, which was still used in Miami-Dade County, could make ballots unreadable by leaving chads hanging and that it "can cause serious errors to occur" by becoming so filled with chads that voters could not punch ballots all the way through.

Ahmann also revealed that he had tried but failed to sell Miami-Dade County on a new stylus designed to help the voter punch the ballot all the way through. The current stylus, he said, did not punch as dependably as the new design.

This witness called by the Bush side, said Gore lawyer David Boies afterward, was the Democrats' best witness. "He made every point we were trying to make," said Boies.

A Bush statistician, Dr. Laurentius Marais, rebutted the Gore statistician's statement that counties using optical voting machines recorded fewer non-votes than those using punch cards. This, he said, reflected the age-old fallacy of assuming a causal relationship where none existed, as in the classic example in which a statistician notes an increase in storks' nests in a town at the same time as an increase in human births and assumes cause and effect.

Marais also cited studies showing that a confusing ballot design, such as Palm Beach County's controversial "butterfly" ballot, could turn voters away from the polls without voting.

It was almost 11:00 Sunday night when Judge Sauls, promising to issue a ruling the next morning, recessed the court.