The ballots, stored in metal boxes stacked in the county warehouse, included only those that did not register a choice for president, those known as the undervotes.
Within George W. Bush's own state of Texas, discrepancies in technology may help explain why three and a half times more voters in Houston failed to register a choice for president than in Dallas.
For those who have yet to register a choice — including this page and 99percentt of Democratic primary voters — Mr. Obama has to show that he has the specific ideas and the personal ability to make good on that promise.
The same voting system in counties that paid to have the scanners at precincts proved very reliable, in part because voters were given a chance to fix ballots rejected for failing to register a choice or for registering more than one.
In a brief address from the vice presidential residence just before 9 p.m., Mr. Gore said that he was challenging the vote count in Florida to ensure that every American had the chance to register a choice in one of the closest presidential races in American history.
Mr. Gore's hopes of overcoming Mr. Bush's slim margin in Florida now hinge primarily on the Florida Supreme Court's overturning this week's ruling by Judge N. Sanders Sauls and ordering a manual count of some 9,000 punch-card ballots in Miami-Dade County that did not register a presidential choice when counted by machine.
So Miller went online and began the multi-step process to register a My Choice account.
Federal law already requires state motor vehicle and some state agencies to offer people the opportunity to register to vote, and automatic voter registration essentially tweaks the process to make registering an opt-out choice instead of an opt-in.
Some abstainers think that they're registering a protest against the awful choices.
At a minimum, he suggested, the Gore campaign would seek to have the 157 votes from the partially completed recount in Miami-Dade included in the final tally, and to have some 10,000 ballots in that county that never registered any choice for president when counted by machine examined to see if voters' intent could be determined.
