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Former U.S. president George W. Bush
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Former U.S. president George W. Bush accidentally voted for Barack Obama at a polling place near his Crawford, TX home.
According to local reports,
the two-term Republican was confused by the instructions on his electronic
voting machine and mistakenly cast a ballot he intended to discard.
Witnesses say Bush argued
with poll workers for several minutes afterwards in a effort to redo his vote,
but in accordance with state law they ultimately denied his request.
The embarrassing incident
may have gone unnoticed if it weren't for a local newspaper reporter who
happened to be voting in the next booth. Suzanna Everett, a politics
correspondent for the Waco Times witnessed the entire ordeal and crafted
a cunning scheme to make it public.
Left On Red
Barred by ethics rules from
using knowledge gained within a polling station, Everett waited for Bush to
leave the facility and ambushed him with a trick question designed to fool him
into revealing the news himself:
"Mr. President Fox News is reporting
that you've accidentally voted for Barack Obama. Would you care to
comment?"
Thinking that his mistake
had already been found out, Bush sought to minimize the damage:
"Yes unfortunately
because of the incompetence of the folks who designed the ballot, my vote
counted for the other guy," Bush responded. He then attempted to explain
exactly how the mishap occurred:
"First of all,
everything was very mismaladjusted on the screen. You shouldn't put the
senators and the congress people and the presidents all jumbled together like
that. It's too crowded. Just confuses folks."
Bush then explained that
after marking the wrong candidate, he sought to correct his error by clicking
the red "Cast Ballot" button, thinking that it was designed to 'cast
away' the ballot and bring up a fresh one:
"Usually red means
stop and green means go. I thought I was stopping"
A New Legacy
Bush is no stranger to Election
Day controversy, having been pushed into office himself by the Florida fiasco
of 2000. In that election hundreds of votes intended for Democratic rival Al Gore
went to protest candidate Pat Buchanan instead due to poor ballot design.
In an official statement
released shortly after the event, former President Bush said his experiences
today have inspired him to make electoral reform the signature cause of his
post-presidency:
"Laura and I will be
dedicating the next few years to fixing our electoral system. Every American
deserves a clear, simple ballot when they go to the polling place."
However, the system Bush
used has been deployed successfully around the country with little incident. A
spokesperson for the company that manufactures the machines says they stand by
their product:
"Until today we have
never had a single instance of someone confusing the "cast ballot"
button for a "cast away ballot" button. This is a problem unique to
Mr. Bush, and we have no plans to change our machines."
Source: The Daily Currant.
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