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 in the show, they would make fun of Ted for wearing an outdated costume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
In major elections it is necessary to count a very large number of votes. Doing this manually is time consuming and expensive. One option to avoid this is to make machine-readable ballots. In this case a hole is punched out of a piece of paper corresponding to the preferred candidate. The machine can then see where the hole is and count the vote. A hanging chad occurs when the hole is not punched cleanly and leaves the offcut paper attached. The machine may read this incorrectly.
The 2000 US Presidential election (between Bush and Gore) was very close, and came down to a recount in Florida, which was using such a system. There was a legal case about how hanging chads should be counted, and the outcome of this legal case effectively decided the election.
So the reference to hanging chads was a reference to the 2000 election, which was presumably some time before the relevant episode aired/was set.
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