What is a hanging Chad?

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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 in the show, they would make fun of Ted for wearing an outdated costume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!

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34 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

A couple decades ago there were voting machines that punched holes in the ballot to clearly indicate which canidate was voted for as the counting machines physically counted the holes similar to how old punch card based computers worked. A hanging Chad referred to ballots that were not completely punched through by the machine or still had bit of paper where the hole would be. Few people know that the name was actually a reference to Chad Schreidenbacker, an activist during the Civil rights era that traveled across Florida helping people register to vote before tragically in 1998, the undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.

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