The Showdown in Palm Beach.

• Position: Confusing election ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida

Helen Halperin went into the voting booth intending to cast a ballot for Vice President Al Gore for President and instead voted for Pat Buchanan. It wasn't a last-second change of heart. The ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida, confused her, and she realized her error on her way home. "I was so troubled," says Halperin, 81. "But I thought, `One vote. How much could that count?'"

In this year's dead-heat election, when a few hundred Florida votes separated Gore and the Republican contender, George W. Bush, every vote mattered. And Halperin wasn't the only Palm Beach resident who claimed to have a problem with the so-called "butterfly ballot," which listed Gore and Buchanan on opposite sides of a single column of hole punches. (This ballot wasn't used in other counties.)

Buchanan, the ultra-conservative Reform Party candidate, received 3,407 votes in the heavily liberal and Democratic Palm Beach County, more than triple his support in any other county in the state. Buchanan himself says some of those votes were probably meant for Gore.

In addition, some 19,000 votes in the county weren't counted because voters punched more than one hole in the ballot. The election...