Dimpled Chads

If I told you dimpled chads played a significant role in US election history, you might simply acknowledge this bit of trivial history with a noncommittal phrase, like “Okay” or something.

These are chads, though—not Chads. If you grew up doing standardized tests during the 1980s, you might have some idea of what’s going on here. Instead of coloring in a bubble, though, chads are what’s left behind when you punch a hole instead. The little rectangle that pops out and falls to the ground is called a chad.

The only issue: they didn’t always fall out. In fact, tens of thousands of ballots in Florida were rejected because the rectangular chads didn’t fall all the way out.

The media had a field day. A coalition of news organizations quickly assembled the National Opinion Research Council to help classify all the different types of chads.

There were, in no particular order:

• Dangling chads (also called hanging chads). These were hanging by one corner, but never fully fell, so you could visualize them constantly swinging in the wind.

• Dimpled chads. Sometimes these were called indented chads, but dimpled sounds way funnier to me. Here, a dent was made in the paper, not a full hole.

• Swinging chads. These held onto two corners, so they could potentially one day aspire to become dangling chads.

• Pregnant chad. Here, a voter tried to push through the hole, but never got through. There is tremendous irony in this name, isn’t there?

So here was this very direct threat to a free and fair system of elections—certainly nothing trivial—and we, the nation, were laughing about dangling and dimpled chads.

At the end of election night, the total number of votes separating Bush and Gore was in the hundreds, so this triggered an automatic recount. After including overseas ballots and recounting, the race was now even closer: Gore was behind by about 150 votes.

At this point, the chad issue became widely known and recognized. The Florida Secretary of State (a Republican) insisted on a strict deadline for the recount, and the Florida Supreme Court ultimately rejected this notion and ordered a statewide recount of all undercounted ballots—the ones with the jacked chads.

As the recount was underway, Bush appealed to the Supreme Court to stop the recount, which they ultimately did. The deadline the Florida Supreme Court had set then passed, and the certified total stood: George W Bush would now be the 43rd President of the United States.

This might seem like a shocking subversion of democratic norms to you, but the reaction by most Americans was… well, about as American as it gets.

Instead of turning most of our focus on avoiding being in a similar situation ever again, where the fairness of an election result would be questioned by most of the nation, Americans made fun of the word chad.

In fairness, the phrases are begging for this. Pregnant Chad? Dimpled, Dangling? These descriptive terms are hilarious, and so is the word chad being used to describe something truly important.

Whistling past the graveyard is just something we Americans do.