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 in the show, they would make fun of Ted for wearing an outdated costume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
The 2000 US Presidential election was very close. It all came down to a few hundred votes in Florida. If the paper was incompletely punched, would the machine count it as a vote? Should the machine count it as a vote? Should humans recount the votes? If there *is* a recount, should the humans count incompletely punched paper as a vote?
This issue was [widely covered in the media](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida). It was a super important question in November 2000, it could literally decide who would be President of the United States.
The situation seemed a bit absurd at the time.
The voting machine experts’ technical terminology of “chads” goes back to at least the 1930’s or 1940’s, but was happily ignored by the general public — until it suddenly thrust into the media spotlight due to its importance in deciding the outcome.
The voting machine experts’ ridiculous names only added to the absurdity; [Wikipedia lists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_%28paper%29) “hanging chad,” “swinging chad”, “tri-chad”, “dimpled chad” and “pregnant chad”. The most ridiculous-sounding terms quickly became the most famous (or infamous), thus “hanging chad” or “pregnant chad”.
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