The audit is only a beginning. A second round of testing on five of Sarasota’s machines produced similar results — using the same protocol — so, the official okay was not unexpected.
It failed to explain the 18,000 undervotes. Christine Jennings’ campaign is undeterred. They will pursue the lawsuit to overturn the election results, calling for a thorough and independent audit of the machines.
Bloggers have donated $48,000 — more than the candidate raised in her own online fundraising pleas, reported the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
[Buchanan’s campaign spokeswoman] said the bloggers supporting Jennings are just another example of “liberal outside interest groups” taking over her campaign.
The undervoting was not evenly spread, but occurred in certain precincts, as I read the Complaint of local voters filed November 21, 2006 in Leon County, Florida.
The congressional undervote rate in Precinct 153 was 38%, meaning that no vote was recorded for more than one in every three voters who cast votes in the U.S. Senate and Governor’s races that appeared on the ballot immediately before and after the congressional race.
The ES & S iVotronic machines also produced high undervoting results outside the congressional 13th (Jennings v. Buchanan) district. For the State Attorney General race, Sumter and Lee counties had undervote rates of 21% and 22%.
The plaintiffs’ experiences varied. Some saw their “x” register when they marked it, but the box in the summary screen was unmarked, with no text warning. Others did not see the congressional ballot until they reached the summary screen, and they voted at the summary screen — something which should not have been possible if the iVotronic worked properly.
In a November 2, 2006 e-mail response to several complainants… who had offered detailed descriptions of the voting machine irregularities they had encountered in early voting [defendant Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent] was dismissive of the reports. Her concluding words were:
With election Day almost upon us, I hope we can stop looking for ways to disrupt the process and disenfranchise voters…. The political strategy of attacking the process has become so vicious that it is destroying the very process that makes it possible to have confidence in the electoral process.
One Sarasota columnist, Tom Lyons, still criticizes the Division of Elections for its confidence that voters, and not the machines, were to blame.
They know the severe limitations of their attempts to uncover malfunctions on touch-screen voting machines after an election. …
The state’s experts know that even if there was a glitch on Election Day, it was darned unlikely that their tests had revealed it, and totally likely that the test team had just messed up again.
Read case files, video links, and more in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s webpage on the disputed election.
The link to the map showing how precincts in the district voted is especially interesting. In fewer than ten precincts the undervote was over 25%. I sense a correlation between old age or neighborhood and suspect precinct machines.
Precinct 153, described in the Complaint, is near a community center precinct, also site of more substantial undervoting. In ten precincts with undervoting of at least 20%, seven were located in mobile home parks or retirement communities — including the place where my mother lives along with a couple of hundred of other octogenarians. Four of these were in the same neighborhood just north of Northport.
If you are computer-comfortable, you could find the county’s explanation of its touch-screen voting machine. Plenty of old people know computers. Plenty more, such as my mother, become confused and frustrated with touch-screen voting. She still can’t operate her telephone answering machine. Her cell phone remains, uncharged, in the pocket of a purse stowed away in a closet. No? Maybe that trunk. Behind the umbrella? Well, somewhere. Good thing she no longer cooks or drives.
In once solid Bush country, Florida’s Gulf Coast elderly population has changed, I gathered from talking to my mother’s acquaintances this summer. The most disgusted re-registered as Democrats, though they’re still friends with the die-hard Republican who displays a Chippendale calendar, and I’m not talking furniture.
They may not be joining impeachment rallies, but in private, the old girls grouse about Iraq and laugh at — not with — President Numbnuts, as a national embarassment. They’ve slowed down a lot, and they don’t say so (it’s imperative to cling to independence) but they expect the younger generation to pick up the ball and run with it.
Will do.
