Sorry, Florida, but Even Bobbleheads Found Voting Easy

The PR team for HBO's weekend movie Recount, the surprisingly politically noncontroversial movie about the tumultuous 2000 Florida presidential vote recount, has come up with an ingenious way to promote the flick:

See if non-Floridians can use the same Votomatic machines without running into problems. Here at Whispers, we got ours on Friday, still filled with those famous chads. It's a real machine stamped with the Palm Beach County label and everything. We were encouraged to use it and tell the world what we found. Well, Whispers decided to let our famed Capitol Bobbleheads give it a try.

But first, here were our initial impressions of the machine. What a mess! Wobbly on four aluminum tubes. Next, the candidate names don't really line up with the hole we're supposed to punch, though that's really just a guide. But the card? OMG. The demonstrator had 228 holes to punch. Granted, only about 10 are to be used, but it's slightly intimidating, and for those with worse eyes than ours, it would be horrible.

So how did our gang do? Well, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama voted for Al Gore. No hanging chads. Sen. John McCain voted for George Bush. No hanging chads. Easy? Somewhat, once they were able to get the little pin into the hole to punch the chad. But it took a while, a situation made tenser by the red-lettered bumper sticker on the back of the machine screaming: LEGAL TIME LIMIT FOR VOTING BOOTH IS 5 MINUTES.