Ballot Trouble?

In the 2000 presidential election, voters in Palm Beach County, Fla., were flummoxed by the butterfly ballot. The confusing ballot design caused thousands of voters, including some Holocaust survivors, to vote for Pat Buchanan when they intended to vote for Al Gore.

Eight years later, it's happening in Palmer Township, Penn., where the absentee ballot design places the name of the candidate below the matching bubble or between two bubbles. One confused voter said:

I'm not a stupid person, and I was very distressed, because here we are; Pennsylvanians -- us, Pennsylvanians! -- could determine the next president of the United States, and this was not a reassuring experience for me.

Poll workers were clueless that voters were being disenfranchised by design:

We didn't even notice that.

Across the state in Philadelphia, election officials and poll workers were unprepared for the high turnout. In the birthplace of our democracy, there were voting irregularities, including malfunctioning voting machines and incomplete voter registration rolls. The names of many of the voters who switched their party registration to Democrat were not on the rolls so they were given a provisional ballot, which may or may not be counted.