E-tail giant Amazon has designed an amusing Web page enabling surfers to determine whether their hand/eye coordination would be up to the challenge of getting Palm Beach County's controversial butterfly ballot right, albeit using a mouse instead of a hole-punch.

Amazon's joke ballot carefully recapitulates the PBC ballot's layout, substituting Amazon merchandise categories for political candidates. In the centre is the same vertically-aligned selection mechanism, with active links.

The page is the work of Amazon's Web development team, which apparently contains one or two loyal Democrats. While not exactly officially sanctioned, Amazon management intends to leave it in place. "It lends itself to a whimsical treatment of the ballot confusion," the company told us. ®