Recount!
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 27816
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"Meet us at my frat house when you get the evidence," Rob, the only one
of the guys Charlotte actually knew before the party, said. "We’ll be
waiting."
Charlotte entered Stevens Hall, the administrative building, and went up to the third floor. The dean’s office was room 3181, and she found it. The door was unlocked. Charlotte didn’t know why it was, but she took advantage of the unlocked door and slipped in unnoticed. Charlotte went over and searched the desk and the desk drawers for anything related to the election. Nothing. She searched the cabinets. Nothing. She turned on the computer and ran a search for election files. Nothing. This was beginning to look quite suspicious, seeing as just a day after the election results had been certified there was no record of the actual results. Disappointed, Charlotte began to clean up so as to not leave any evidence she had been there. She turned off the computer, closed the cabinets and drawers carefully, and went to turn the lights off when she noticed a big brown box next to the trash can. She opened it, and sure enough, there were the election ballots. Charlotte took the box. She was lucky, she thought. No one would notice the election ballots missing; the Dean would just think that the janitors had taken it out with the trash. It was an ingenious plan that she had lucked into. She would take the ballots back to the frat house and hold a recount. Then she would find out why Judy had won so easily. Charlotte covered up the rest of her trace, grabbed the box, and headed to the frat house. Judy exited the third floor women’s restroom and made her way back to the Dean’s Office. Her plan was perfect, she thought. She knew the Dean only certified the results of the election from the tallies done by his not-so-bright staffers, but Charlotte would no doubt bring up charges of election fraud. Judy had broken into the Dean’s Office, wiped the computer clean of election records, thrown away any possibly incriminating papers, and removed the ballot box from its place on top of one of the cabinets. She had proceeded to take out some of the nearly 5,000 extra ballots she had cast for herself, and put them in plastic bags which she would flush down the toilet. Since the dean said she had won by over 4000 votes she didn’t need to worry about how many she took out as long as it wasn’t too much. She had taken out almost 4000 before closing the door as quietly as possible and sprinting to the women’s restroom. Now, she entered the room again to cover her trace. The box was gone! Oh well, she thought. One of the janitors must have assumed it was trash and taken it out to the dumpster. Little did she know... The box was quite heavy for only being filled with pieces of paper, but Charlotte finally managed to get it to Rob’s frat house. She put the box down and rang the doorbell. An unfamiliar guy answered. "Oh, you must be Rob’s friend," he said. "They’re upstairs, first room on the right." Charlotte lugged the box upstairs where she found Rob, along with the newspaper guy and the other guys from the party. "I didn’t find any records, but I got something better: the actual ballots. We’re doing a recount, boys!" It was late, about 3:00 in the morning when they finally saw the bottom of the box, but no one minded. The few of them that did go to class didn’t have it until 2 or 3 in the afternoon; plenty of time to sleep. As of 3:00 in the morning, Charlotte was losing 2,542 to 2,545, with about 500 votes left to count. "Well, we’ve only got these last 500 or so votes to count," the newspaper guy said. "Let’s finish this." The first 240 votes were about evenly split, though Charlotte made up enough ground to pull ahead by three vote. The next 262 votes were marked exactly the same way: a checkmark in blue pen in the box next to "Judy," Judy won, 2,924 to 2,665. "Hold on," said the newspaper guy. "I thought the Dean said that Judy won by 4000 votes. However, if it wasn’t for those last 262 mysterious ballots, Charlotte would have won by three votes." "In addition," the mature guy from the party said, "our school doesn’t even have 5000 freshmen. For Judy to have won by 4000 votes either Charlotte would have had to have less than 500 votes, which didn’t happen, or Judy would have had to stuff the ballot box." "You’re right," Charlotte realized. "Judy cheated, and she won. But the problem isn’t that I’m not president, the problem is that because of that I’ve been humiliated in front of the whole student body. And that’s somewhere around 15,000 people! We can show the Dean that Judy cheated, but that won’t change the fact that I had to run around the campus naked!" "Well," said Rob, "We could...
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unknown adventurer
6/15/2004 1:34:52 PM
Extending Enabled
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