Right now we have a diaryon the Rec list that describes a similar glitch, unintentional and simply something easy to confuse, in the Philadelphia voting machines.

If the potential confusion of the butterfly ballots had been noticed by someone early in the voting who was a user here, an alert could have gone out.   There could have been party members assigned, an appropriate distance away from the voting booths, to hand out a notice of the problem and how to avoid it.

In eight short years we have had a revolution in connectivity that has changed our world.

This would have made the small difference that would have put Florida in the Democratic tally, and there would have been no evaluation of hanging chads.  There would have been no "Brooks Brothers Invasion" by Republican lawyers to intimidate those who were doing the recounts.  There would have been no law suits that culminated with the improbable intervention by the U.S. Supreme court.

There would not have been an invasion of Iraq, and most likely we would not have had the meltdown in our economic system we are still struggling with.

For Want of a Nail

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

As an aside, Wikipedia has an excellent articleon the derivation along with the modern theoretical incarnations of this ancient cautionary tale. One of them is the Butterfly effect, a variation of Chaos theory.  

The "Butterfly Ballot" now joins the long list of examples of the effect of missing that one simple nail.