They should be sorted out well in advance of any election. Hopefully, we will learn and do better next time. As for the Buchanan vote in Palm Beach, many have decided that there was something fishy happening on election night. A display of each of Florida's counties' vote totals for Buchanan shows his numbers dramatically higher in Palm Beach than anywhere else. The reason his vote looked so big in Palm Beach was because that county is one of Florida's most populous.
Scale is important.
Looking at Buchanan's vote alone in each county yields a set of small numbers that look big on a chart. But as Patrick Anderson of the Anderson Economic Group explains, when we include the votes for Bush and Gore on that chart, the scale increases dramatically, and Buchanan's vote looks like one even trend of no consequence. Finding a village with a number of cases of childhood cancer prompts cries of outrage and a hunt for causation. A broader perspective usually demonstrates that the cluster is a coincidence, a bit of statistical noise in an otherwise clear picture. Of course, we leave it to the partisans to decide whether or not Pat Buchanan is truly comparable to childhood cancer.