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 in the show, they would make fun of Ted for wearing an outdated costume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 hanging chad is specifically a reference to the 2000 election between bush and Al gore. That’s why they made fun of him for the old reference.
Florida used paper ballots. Voters used a little tool to punch a hole in the paper next to the candidate to indicate their choice, and a machine would scan the ballot and read the holes. The little bits of paper punched out of the holes are called “chads” (just like the tiny circles of paper created by a paper hole puncher). It turned out these chads didn’t always fall off cleanly and would still be stuck behind hanging on the ballot, causing the machine to miscount the vote. The ballots had to be recounted by hand which took a long time and the election was super close and the Supreme Court had to get involved so it was a big deal at the time as you can imagine.
Latest Answers