Bloggermann Finds Hanging Chads

Some news by way of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann...MSNBC - Hanging Chads and Hanging ParticiplesNovember 22, 2004 | 11:15 p.m. ET(Keith Olbermann)[ ... deletia ... ]Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent of Newsweek and since the days of our old The Big Show an MSNBC analyst, ... put it in terms that the mainstream can't ignore. He told me he'd talked to Ohio's [Secretary of State Kenneth] Blackwell earlier in the evening. "There in fact will be a recount," Howard said with a sigh that encapsulated all of the Florida 2000 Experience. "We will be talking about chads once again."As Kerry himself calculated early on November 3rd, the Provisional Ballots alone obviously could not provide anything close to enough bona fide Democratic votes to overcome President Bush's 135,000 vote plurality in the Ohio election night tally. But as Howard also pointed out - and my colleague David Shuster so thoroughly extrapolated in a previous post on Hardblogger - the Provisionals plus the "Undercount" could make things very close indeed. The punch-card ballots "where it looks like nobody marked anything" when read by an optical scanning machine, might produce thousands of legitimate votes if hand-counted and judged by Ohio's strict laws defining how many corners of the proverbial chads have to be detached to make a vote valid.In Ohio, the reality of the recount is beginning to sink in, and local governments aren't happy about it.[ ... deletia ... ]Very interesting...