Did election queues decide the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections?
They well might have. In each of the two elections, one state decided the fate of the election: Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. In 2000, more than 5,801,000 votes were cast in Florida, and the official vote tally favored the winner by only 537 votes. With widely reported long queues in the precincts, nobody knows how many of those who came to vote balked or reneged. If there were at least 538 such voters, less than 0.01 percent of all the counted votes, one cannot be sure which candidate could have won Florida — in the absence of balking and reneging. In reviewing the 2000 election, one news analyst summed it up this way: “There were a variety of reasons for these votes not being cast or counted.” After recounting technological problems, he states, “Finally at some voting stations the lines of voters were simply too long and many voters abandoned their attempt to vote because they were not willing to queue for hours” [7]. Abandonment = reneging. In the 2004 election, with the Oh
