| FatesWebb |
Well looky here, mike has been arguing with me about election trouble in florida, and this story shows up in the New York Times....
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Published: November 10, 2006
Vern Buchanan, top, a Republican Congressional candidate in Florida, celebrated an unofficial victory on election night.
In Florida, Echoes of 2000 as Vote Questions Emerge
Quote: Originally posted by newyorktimes
SARASOTA, Fla., Nov. 9 — A Democrat who narrowly lost the Congressional race here is seeking a recount after dozens of people reported problems using Sarasota County’s touch-screen voting machines and a significant number of ballots had no recorded votes in the high-profile race.
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Chip Litherland for The New York Times
But his opponent, Christine Jennings, has not conceded, pointing to voting irregularities.
The Democrat, Christine Jennings, lost to her Republican opponent, Vern Buchanan, by just 373 votes out of a total 237,861 cast — one of the closest House races in the nation. More than 18,000 voters in Sarasota County, or 13 percent of those who went to the polls Tuesday, did not seem to vote in the Congressional race when they cast ballots, a discrepancy that Kathy Dent, the county elections supervisor, said she could not explain.
In comparison, only 2 percent of voters in one neighboring county within the same House district and 5 percent in another skipped the Congressional race, according to The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota. And many of those who did not seem to cast a vote in the House race did vote in more obscure races, like for the hospital board.
More than 100 voters have told the Jennings campaign that their votes for her did not show up on the summary screen at the end of the touch-screen voting process, and that they had to re-enter them. The candidate’s lawyers said they feared that not everyone had noticed the problem or realized that they could re-enter the vote.
“There is a spontaneous combustion of outcry in this county,” said Kendall Coffey, a lawyer who was on Vice President Al Gore’s legal team in the 2000 presidential recount and is now working for Ms. Jennings. “We are determined to do everything we can to make sure that every vote counts and everything we can to get to the bottom of this.”
A recount will almost certainly be conducted because the vote was so close. State law requires machine recounts when the margin of victory is half a percentage point or less, and manual recounts when it is a quarter of a percentage point or less. But it is not clear that a recount can recover a vote that was never properly recorded.
The Florida Elections Canvassing Commission, which includes Gov. Jeb Bush and two other state officials, both Republicans, will meet Monday and decide whether to order a recount. Secretary of State Sue M. Cobb announced Wednesday that she would send a team to conduct an audit of the county’s voting system.
Any recount results would be certified on Nov. 20, said Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for the Florida Department of State. In a manual recount of touch-screen voting results, Mr. Ivey said, canvassers try to determine whether voters who skipped making a selection in a certain race did so unintentionally.
But Rebecca Mercuri, a computer scientist and an expert on voting technology in Hamilton, N.J., who has been critical of electronic voting, said it would be impossible to figure out voter intent in a recount of touch-screen votes.
“If a vote is not recorded electronically inside the machine for whatever reason, there’s no way to go back and recover it,” Ms. Mercuri said. “Chances are that nothing’s going to change, because those votes are gone.”
A preliminary review by The Herald-Tribune found that if Ms. Jennings had won the same percentage of the 18,000 missing votes as she did among counted votes in Sarasota County, she would have won the race by about 600 votes instead of losing by 373.
Ms. Jennings, a banker, and Mr. Buchanan, a car dealer, ran a bitter and costly race to replace Representative Katherine Harris, who left her seat to run for Senate but lost by a landslide on Tuesday. Ms. Harris, a Republican, was Florida’s secretary of state during the disputed 2000 presidential recount, supervising a balloting process widely considered flawed and certifying President Bush as the winner of Florida’s electoral votes.
Mr. Buchanan declared victory early Wednesday and began preparing for his new job, but Ms. Jennings has refused to concede. She has not ruled out going to court, Mr. Coffey said, but she will first wait for a recount to be completed.
Some state officials, including Ms. Dent, the elections supervisor, theorized that many voters skipped the Congressional race because they were turned off by vitriolic campaigning. But Mr. Coffey said if that had been the case, other counties in the same Congressional district would have had similarly high “undervote” rates.
So many voters reported similar problems in the state’s early voting period, Mr. Coffey said, that the Jennings campaign wrote a letter to Ms. Dent expressing concern. He said the results showed that an even larger portion of early voters — 20 percent of the total — did not vote in the Congressional race. By contrast, only 2 percent of voters using paper absentee ballots skipped the race, he said.
Mr. Coffey said Ms. Jennings wanted independent experts to come test the county’s iVotronic voting machines, made by Election Systems and Software of Omaha. Ms. Dent did not return a call seeking comment on Wednesday.
“I don’t think any of us would be satisfied with having the government do the verification,” Mr. Coffey said, “because, honestly, the government appears to be part of the problem here.”
Mike Lasche, a boat captain here, said that when he voted his vote for Ms. Jennings did not show up on the final review screen until he cast it a second time.
“If I had not checked carefully I would have gone on without ever thinking about it,” said Mr. Lasche, 50. “You have to wonder how many people it happened to and may not have even noticed it.”
Lynn Waddell contributed reporting from Sarasota and Terry Aguayo from Miami. |
whats great is I started the thread because mike made a comment about how nobody was claiming voter fraud when the democrats win. He argued with me as much as he could. but now he cannot deny I even named the county sarasota...
Mike is ANTI-DEMOCRACY
[18k missing votes] |
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| FatesWebb |
| not only was this race to fill Katherine Harris' seat in the House, but people in Sarasota also voted on a ballot initiative to mandate paper trail verified elections. And, of course, they voted to APPROVE this initiative. Unfortunately, in this election there doesn't happen to be a paper trail, just a massive statistically impossible undervote. |
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| FatesWebb |
| OHHHH MIKE!!!!! YOUR NEEDED TO DENY STUFF IN THIS THREAD!!!! |
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