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 in the show, they would make fun of Ted for wearing an outdated costume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
Ah, the joys of the English language. “Chad” is a word that has like 10 different completely unrelated definitions. One of those definitions refers to the empty space left in a piece of paper when you punch a hole in it.
In the context of HIMYM, it’s a reference to the 2000 US Presidential Election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, which ultimately came down to an almost unbelievably close election in the state of Florida. Ultimately the election was decided by 537 votes (out of over 6 million cast in the state), or 0.009%.
Needless to say the election was *highly* contested (massive understatement). In Florida that year, ballots were cast by the voter physically punching a hole in the ballot next to the name of the candidate they wanted to vote for. This was to make it easier for machines to read the ballots by looking for the holes (or “chads”).
Except people are imperfect and sometimes didn’t punch a clean hole all the way through the paper. This left a little dangly piece of paper where the hole should have been, which is called a “hanging chad.”
Normally such discrepancies would be ignored, but in an election as close as that one, every vote mattered, so what to do with ballots with hanging chads became a hot button topic for debate. And so there was, basically overnight, a whole lot of discussion on the news about “hanging chads”.
People thought that sounded funny so it became fodder for a lot of wordplay-based jokes such as the one you saw on HIMYM.
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