Others stepped forward to remonstrate fiercely with the presiding officer to force him to move the ballot boxes into the sun.
He said it may be necessary for a recount or for disputed ballots to be inspected and that he did not want to do anything that might "further risk the integrity of the election" - like moving the ballots from Juneau to Fairbanks.
He was on vacation, he said, but found himself on the phone, dealing with an impasse: the officials said they risked invalidating all ballots if they moved the voting booths to the smaller lounge.
Even the decision to move all the ballots to Tallahassee came after an hourlong hearing that dealt largely with the logistical minutae of how they should be transported.
Judging by last year's closure of the Oxnard distribution center in Ventura County, it will now take from five to seven days, instead of from one to three days, for unmarked ballots to move the short distance from county registrar offices to voter mailboxes.
Sanders called for a revolution — a peaceful revolution at the ballot box — to move the country away from an economy where middle class wages have stagnated for decades even as big corporations and banks have enjoyed obscene profits.
(What, the Neighborhood Purity Initiative wasn't available?) So did the decision by its authors to move the measure from last fall's ballot to March, an election-shopping move that will avoid the younger, more diverse electorate — an electorate of renters as opposed to homeowners — that goes to the polls in November.
So when the accountants began redistributing the ballots, eliminating, one by one, the movies with the fewest No. 1 votes and moving those ballots to the voters' second (and, if necessary, third or fourth) choices, the "Spotlight" stack continued to grow.
"The voice of the street needs to be moved to the ballot boxes," the president of Catalonia, Artur Mas, told lawmakers at the regional Parliament.
Today the general public appears to have moved past the ballot-counting disputes and grown comfortable with Mr. Bush's legitimacy as president.
