But it took the media consortium eleven months of playing "Carnac" with Florida ballots to tell us that.

They predicted that a careful recount in Florida ballots would reveal that Mr. Gore was the true winner.

But the Florida ballots are still there, nearly six million punch cards and their chads, stowed in boxes, stacked on pallets, wrapped in plastic.

After weeks of negotiations, the organized effort by news organizations to examine uncounted Florida ballots has resulted in two independent projects.

It is not as if only Florida ballots mattered.

Meanwhile, Patrick Buchanan, the Reform Party candidate, was fighting to get on the Florida ballot.

The 10 presidential candidates on the Florida ballot were fit on a single page in every other county in Florida that used the paper punch cards.

The ballot review project commissioned by eight media organizations tried to decipher 175,010 Florida ballots that went unexamined in last fall's presidential election and the ensuing recounts.

In 1980, the last time both races were on the Florida ballot, the dropoff was 1 percent.

And this Florida ballot is going to show up in UI books for the next 100 years.