FL-13: Contesting the Vote

Whether deliberate or just a malfunction, we're headed toward a new election in Florida:

Citing statistical and eyewitness evidence of significant machine malfunctions sufficient to call into doubt the result of the election for Florida Congressional District 13, the Christine Jennings campaign today officially contested the election in Circuit Court. The complaint specifically requests the judge to order a new election “to ensure that the will of the people of the Thirteenth District is respected, and to restore the confidence of the electorate, which has been badly fractured by this machine-induced debacle.”

More than 17,000 undervotes (15%) were recorded on Sarasota County’s electronic voting machines, a rate nearly 6 times higher than the undervote rate in the other District 13 counties or in Sarasota’s paper absentee ballots. Jennings won Sarasota County by a 53% - 47% margin, while losing the district-wide manual recount by 369 votes. As noted in the complaint:

“The failure to include these votes constitutes a rejection of a number of legal votes sufficient to place in doubt, and likely change, the outcome of the election.”

In a way this election was a perfect storm. It was close enough that the e-voting problems mattered, it was distributed in such a way that at least gave the appearance of deliberate unfairness, and there were enough eyewitnesses to attest to the problems to back up the claim.

I don't know if it will ever be determined whether or not the Buchanan campaign intentionally fixed the election. But the point is that enough reasonable doubt has been raised to justify doing the election over. Certainly, there's no way that the Democratic Congress should seat this guy until all legal decisions are made final.

This little House election may be the downfall of electronic voting machines. Look at what they're requesting in discovery:

As part of the discovery process, the Jennings campaign seeks expedited discovery of items including audit and ballot-image logs generated by the iVotronic system, iVotronic machines and related hardware that generated particularly high undervote rates, and the software – particularly the source code – used to operate that hardware.

The bottom line is that the liability is so great that I can't see municipalities wanting to go through the time and expense of something like this ever again. Diebold, ES&S, all of them had better hope for their sake that they've sold a LOT of ATM machines in FY2007, because they're all done in the election industry.

...for the record, I think this was a standard-issue malfunction.