Chad-maker says ‘dimples’ made up
Dec. 13, 2000: Ever wonder how a chad could dimple? Printer Randy Stiles makes chads for a living, and he wondered the same thing.
“It would basically be impossible to do that,” said Stiles, a production manager at the printing plant that made the controversial punch-card ballots for Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
He said his own machines don’t produce any dimpled chad as they perforate the thousands of ballot cards used by the Florida counties and others around the country.
“There’s some new words that have come up. You know, ‘dimpled chad,’ ‘pregnant chad.’ I’ve never heard about those before this election,” he told WND.
Stiles said all chad punched with a stylus leave a kind of fingerprint: A pinhole and a vertical crease from where pressure was applied in the middle of the square piece of paper. Any dimpled or pregnant chad would most likely also show a pinhole and crease, he says. If they don’t, chances are they weren’t made with a stylus.
Stiles said he was baffled by Democrats’ claims of voters having problems piercing through ballots – using sharp, pointed styluses – to vote for Gore.
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