According to Merriam-Webster’s on-line dictionary (www.m-w.com), an adage is “a saying often in metaphorical form that embodies a common observation.” There are three adages that describe the election mess in Florida.

Adage No. 1: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. In 1996, I was in Colorado at the time of the election. I applied for and received an absentee ballot from the city of Bangor. I completed it and put enough postage on it to get it back here. I also mailed it about a week before the election to make sure that it was in Bangor on Election Day. However, that ballot did not count.

Why not? It was obviously my intention to vote. Intentions don’t count if you break the rules. If I’m driving a car that is going 50 mph in a 35, I am speeding. If a cop catches me, it wouldn’t matter if I were speeding on purpose or speeding because I absentmindedly missed the sign for the change in the speed limit. Intentions don’t count. Actions do.

In 1996, I was caught breaking a voting rule. I have a bad habit of not putting a return address on a business envelope and the envelope that an absentee ballot is mailed in has to be signed by the voter on a preprinted line in the upper left-hand corner. I know I didn’t sign it. I did not obey the rules. My ballot didn’t count.

Adage No. 2: What’s old is new again. The article in the Bangor Daily News on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 1978, is less than four inches long – including its three-line headline: “Voting machine can surprisingly go ‘Hayeswire.'”

“Candidates, if they expect to win, aren’t supposed to vote for their opponents,” it began. “But Bill Cohen did Tuesday, by mistake.”

“Apparently a voting machine malfunctioned at Bangor’s Abraham Lincoln School, where the Cohens voted, meaning that he inadvertently cast a ballot for independent Hayes Gahagan.”

In 1978, Bangor used a punch card ballot similar to the ones used this year in several counties in Florida and elsewhere. A voter inserted the punch card into the machine in the voting booth and punched holes to the left of the candidate’s name.

Like the Cohens, I voted at Abraham Lincoln School in Bangor that year and noticed that I had to be very careful with my ballot. Because the hinges on the machine were not tight, the names and appropriate holes did not always line up correctly.

Each candidate had a number. Cohen’s was five. Hayes Gahagan’s was six. After pulling the ballot out of the machine, I made sure that I had punched the hole numbered five on the card – was well as the properly numbered hole for all other candidates and issues on that ballot.

Cohen was, at that time, the 2nd District congressman running against Sen. William Hathaway and two independents, including Hayes Gahagan, for the U.S. Senate. Cohen won – both the statewide election and every precinct in the city of Bangor by a minimum of about 49 percent and won his own precinct by 52 percent. Therefore, my conclusion is simple:Voters are intelligent, careful and generally make their intentions clear. Holding a ballot up to a light with a magnifying glass is unnecessary.

The next day, the Bangor Daily News printed a copy of that ballot in the machine with the numbers misaligned. Beneath it was a more extensive article with the following headline: “City clerk says, being careful in voting avoids chance of error.” I should have remembered that in 1996.

And that brings up adage No. 3: Actions speak louder than words. True – both when you’re driving a car and when you are voting.

Anne Kenniston lives in Eddington.