From Bryan Curtis’ essay at Slate on swing state New Mexico (September 10, 2004):
Al Gore won New Mexico by 366 votes in 2000, and I’ve managed to track down the man who delivered them. … On Election Day 2000, George W. Bush appeared to narrowly win New Mexico’s five electoral votes. But more than three weeks later, with the nation’s attention glued to Florida, Davis, a retired engineer from White Sands, “discovered” 500 Gore votes that had somehow eluded the counters. Amid the howls of local Republicans, New Mexico shifted into the Gore column. If Gore had carried one more small state—West Virginia, say, or New Hampshire—New Mexico might have been Florida and Davis its Katherine Harris.
…. Davis had wandered into Dona Ana County’s adobe courthouse one morning, when he ran into the county clerk, Rita Torres. Torres needed a Democrat to monitor the formal vote canvassing, so Davis joined a Republican operative in Room 104. “I was sitting there next to the Republican representative, and he said, ‘Look at all these stupid Democrats, they didn’t even vote for president,’ ” Davis says. “It just didn’t jibe.” In fact, a worker in a heavily Democratic precinct had scrawled the number “620” on a tally sheet so poorly that it looked like “120”—thus, 500 Gore votes had vanished.