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Voting FAQ

Emily Yoffe
Posted Monday, Nov. 13, 2000, at 6:19 PM ET

He's up, he's down, his chad are so pregnant they need to be induced. What's the deal with this election?

What's the origin of the word "chad"?

The word first appeared in 1947, according to Merriam-Webster, to describe the little rectangles of paper that are created when punching holes in data cards or other larger sheets. The etymological origin is unknown. Grammatically speaking there are no "chads" because "chad" is a plural noun.

If it's not a really close election, do officials bother to count absentee ballots?

Yes, but it takes a while. The reason absentee ballots are not counted by Election Day is that state election officials have to check the names on the envelopes of the mailed ballots against voter registration lists to make sure people haven't voted twice.

When is an election officially over?

When the results are certified, in most states by the secretary of state's office. It takes days or weeks for the results from all counties and absentee ballots to go to the office so a certificate of election can be issued. In most cases this is just a technicality because the results are so clear that the winners celebrate and the losers concede.

Who won the Oregon presidential election?

Al Gore, according to The Associated Press. The state, which has the first all mail-in presidential vote, won't certify until Nov. 27. Officials say it wasn't any glitches in the system that delayed declaring even the unofficial winner, it was the closeness of the race. Gore is leading by about 5,600 votes. Oregon has an automatic recount if the difference between the two top vote getters is less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the total votes cast. In this case, a recount would be triggered if the margin were 2,800 votes or less, so a Gore win looks assured.

How many different ways are there to cast a vote?

Five. The oldest, paper ballots, were used by 1.7 percent of the U.S. electorate in the last presidential election. Mechanical lever machines, which register votes through counting wheels, not ballots, were introduced in 1892. Though the machines are no longer manufactured, they were used by 20.7 percent of the voters in the 1996 presidential race. The now internationally famous punch-card method of voting, a result of the nascent computer industry, was first used in 1964. In 1996, 37.3 percent of presidential voters cast their ballots that way. Optical scanning, or Marksense systems, like those used to read multiple choice answers on standardized tests, were used by 24.6 percent of voters in the last presidential race. The newest technology, direct recording electronic (DRE), is an electronic update of the old lever machine. Voters enter their choice on touch-screens or through buttons. Last time 7.7 percent of voters made their selection this way.

For more voting questions, click here and here.

Next questions?

Explainer thanks Paddy McGuire of the Oregon Secretary of State's office and Eric Olson of the Center for Voting and Democracy. For more information see www.fec.gov.

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Emily Yoffe is the author of What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner. You can send your Human Guinea Pig suggestions or comments to .
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Reader Comments from The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: Several readers came up with chad derivations: all slightly different even though they'd apparently all looked it up in the same place. What a metaphor for a recount. We liked Penalcolony's rather surreal twist best ("it's the stuff not produced by a chadless keypunch") though we don't believe it for a moment: definitely has the feel of something made up later to fit the facts.]


According to the Hacker´s Dictionary the word chad is derived from the "Chadless keypunch." This device did not produce the stuff, but it was named so simply because it had been invented by a Mr Chadless. Hence the name "chad" for the small bits of waste paper.

--Mutatis Mutandis

(To reply, click here.)


The word derives from the Chadless keypunch (named for its inventor), which cut little u-shaped tabs in the card to make a hole when the tab folded back, rather than punching out a circle/rectangle. The debris that other keypunches made had to be "chad", since the "chadless" keypunch didn't make it.

--Penalcolony

(To reply, click here.)


The big difference in methods of voting is by ballot or by teller. The paper ballot can be secret but not anonymous. The lever-machines are anonymous teller votes.

Some punch cards are secret, like paper ballots, and some are anonymous, like a lever-machine, depending on how the stubs are handled.

The significance of this is simple: A mis-vote on a paper or paper-like ballot can be corrected by matching the ballot back with the stub and the person who cast the ballot. A mis-vote by teller cannot be corrected, save by re-staging the vote.

--J.R.Behrman

(To reply, click here.)

(11/14)

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