North Attleboro discarded punch cards after an acrimonious election to build a new middle school in January 1995. A recount was held when the new school was approved by a 158-vote margin out of 5,290 votes cast. The school lost eight votes in the recount, but overall the project prevailed. Election officials are told to keep punch card ballots away from moisture, lest they become even more difficult to punch through. On the basement floor of city hall, said Jessie Joubert, who worked for more than two decades in the city elections office.
Problems can also occur when the ballots are misaligned.
The machine automatically canceled them out. In 1985, Tony Viveiros beat incumbent Thomas Dudson by one vote in the initial count for the Ward 2 city council seat. He lost by one vote in a recount. Bill Crowley, an Attleboro election commissioner, is more blunt. On occasion, we'd run them through two or three times until the count came close to what it was supposed to be.