I first heard this term in How I Met Your Mother when Ted dressed up as a hanging Chad for Halloween. I tried to look it up & Google basically just said that it was a voting ballot that people used to punch holes out of. But I feel like I’m missing something.. in the show, they would make fun of Ted for wearing an outdated costume
& would tell him that “the hanging Chad reference
Is very old” & that most people wouldn’t understand it. Which signifies some sort of inside joke or understanding, but I don’t get it. please! Thank you!
In: 373
When Al Gore and George Bush both ran for President. It came down to which of them won in Florida. The problem was that in Florida, they used those punch card voting machines. The “chad” is the punched out paper piece. The election was close enough that they were asked to recount every single ballot. Some ballots has that chad just hanging on by the tiniest fiber of paper. So the hole was there, but the piece of punched out paper was also still there. Those were “hanging chads” and it mattered if you counted the ballot with hanging chads as voted or not voted for. Like maybe I pushed “Al Gore” on my ballot, (simplified, I know you have to vote for an elector) but the voting machine didn’t quite punch the “Al Gore” spot, or the punchout was still hanging there. Was it counted as a vote for Al Gore, or was it counted as “no vote for either candidate?”
That became a huge issue and it was all over the news durnig the 2000 US Presidential election.
So it’s an old reference, but it’s one that many people have heard, like you.
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