ALLAHASSEE - With the vote-counting deadline hours away, Democratic operatives have been furiously collecting testimony that they believe could be used to contest the results of the presidential election if George W. Bush is named the winner tonight.
The affidavits, collected from people familiar with the Palm Beach County punch cards, and made public over the weekend, came to the same conclusion: The voting mechanism, not human error or indecision, is to blame for the dimpled, pregnant, and hanging chads.
William S. Rouverol, who helped design the Votomatic punch card machines in the early 1960s, said that rubber strips behind the ballot, which are meant to clean the perforation from the stylus, can wear out. This, he said, can result in incomplete or slightly bulging perforations.
''The actual hardness of the backing rubber may differ from one column to the next according to the amount of use,'' Rouverol said in a sworn statement, which was separate from his testimony on Friday before the Palm Beach County canvassing board.
''If the strips are too hard ... a chad is less likely to detach from the ballot and pass through the strips,'' Rouverol said, ''resulting in ballots with dimpled or pregnant chads.''
He also said that when plastic strips are used instead, as they were in Palm Beach, the problem ''could be more severe.''
''I do not believe that a voter's inability to punch out chads in one column should hold any bearing on their inability to do so in another column,'' Rouverol said. ''In my opinion, dimpled or pregnant chads, if the only discernable mark for a given race in a given column, should qualify as a vote.''
Furthermore, he said that when designing the system, he had considered using the so-called butterfly ballot, as used in Palm Beach. But he decided against it because he thought the setup would ''complicate the act of voting'' and would lead to more incomplete perforations because the chads would build up in one area.
Jackie Winchester, the former supervisor of elections for Palm Beach County, also blamed the equipment, not the voters.
She said that several years ago, the county had bought ''inferior'' plastic marking units, rather than the rubber ones they had used before.
''The vendor replaced all of these inferior units, but even these replacement units may contain a harder plastic material,'' Winchester said in her affidavit. ''It is also my considered opinion that this harder plastic material could cause difficulties for voters in punching clean holes in punch card ballots, especially in the first column of the punch card.'' The first column was where the presidential candidates were listed.
As a result, the chads could build up on top of the plastic unit, rather than fall into the tray.
''This could easily result in difficulty in punching chads,'' she said. ''For this reason, in municipal elections, when there were fewer offices on the ballot, I did not use the first punch-card column when laying out the ballot.''
Linda Ehrlich, a voter and civil rights lawyer from Boca Raton, said she had tried to punch the Gore-Lieberman hole but had had difficulty pushing the stylus through.
''As is my habit, I pushed the stylus into the Gore slot three or four times in rapid succession. It seemed to me that the stylus did not punch through what I now know is called the chad. I removed the card to verify that it had not gone through. After reinserting the card, I punched the Gore slot three or four more times, but the stylus failed to punch the chad,'' Ehrlich said.
She eventually used her fingers to tear off the perforation, and then warned the election workers of the problem.
''I have been frustrated and angered hearing the pundits mocking voters in Florida for being too old and feeble to properly punch the ballot with a stylus,'' Ehrlich said. She added that she is a distance runner, that she does weight training, and that she has excellent vision and coordination.
''This was a case of defective voting apparatus, not a defective voter,'' she said.
A statistics professor from Yale University agreed.
Nicholas Hengartner, who is also a statistical consultant for the district attorney's office in New Haven, analyzed the so-called undervotes in 48 Florida counties.
The counties that used optical voting systems registered undervotes in 3 of 1,000 votes, he said. The incidence from punch cards was 15 of 1,000.
''The probability that this fivefold increase in the undervote rate can be attributed to chance alone is practically zero, and is less than being hit by lightning five times,'' Hengartner said. ''The odds are even worse in Palm Beach County, where 22 of 1,000 voters cast an undervote in the presidential election.''
