FL-13: To Seat Or Not To Seat

Howard Dean says what needs to be said about the Christine Jennings/Vern Buchanan debacle.

Republican Vern Buchanan might be the official winner in a messy Sarasota-area congressional race, but Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean says the Democratic-controlled Congress should not seat Buchanan without another election.

"Absolutely not," Dean said in a taped Political Connections interview scheduled to air Sunday on Bay News 9. "You cannot seat someone if you don't have an election that's valid.

"This election is not valid. There are 18,000 people who may have voted, and we don't know what happened to their votes," Dean said. "You can bet that if the Republicans were 500 votes short they'd be calling for a new election, and they'd be right."

Jennings is exhausting every available option to try to get a new election. She's suing in a Florida court. But she'll also ask the House Administration Committee, which has jurisdiction over federal elections, to open an investigation. Word is that Jennings has been all over the Hill drumming up support.

The Administration Committee typically waits until all lawsuits have been decided before opening an investigation, according to the article. In the meantime, the Democratic leadership has a decision to make. Do they seat Buchanan pending the outcome of the lawsuit? Or do they take Dean's advice and refuse to seat him until there is some closure? According to the article, they're leaning toward the former, and I think it's a horrible choice. The Democrats still have a whiff of being afraid of their own shadow, and they're still wary of pissing off the Republicans for some reason. But this guy didn't win the election. He didn't win anything. The will of the voter is completely unknown. I don't know how you can seat someone under those conditions.

This, ultimately, is the problem with voting machines without a paper trail. If this doesn't put the nail in that coffin, I don't know what will. And the momentum is there to get this going.

New federal guidelines, along with legislation given a strong chance to pass in Congress next year, will probably combine to make the paperless voting machines obsolete, the officials say. States and counties that bought the machines will have to modify them to hook up printers, at federal expense, while others are planning to scrap the machines and buy new ones.

Motivated in part by voting problems during the midterm elections last month, the changes are a result of a growing skepticism among local and state election officials, federal legislators and the scientific community about the reliability and security of the paperless touch-screen machines used by about 30 percent of American voters.

The changes also mean that the various forms of vote-counting software used around the country — most of which are protected by their manufacturers for reasons of trade secrecy — will for the first time be inspected by federal authorities, and the code could be made public. There will also be greater federal oversight on how new machines are tested before they arrive at polling stations.

“In the next two years I think we’ll see the kinds of sweeping changes that people expected to see right after the 2000 election,” said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a nonpartisan election group. “The difference now is that we have moved from politics down to policies.”

The problem is that, if the machine malfunctions the way it did in the Jennings race, and didn't record votes in that particular election, the paper trail would be likely to show no votes in that race as well. A paper trail on a bad machine would be little more than a bad paper trail.

What I do like is if the code is made public and inspected by federal authorities. Sunshine is desperately needed on the source code. Without trust in the vote there is no trust in this democracy. Just because 2006 was mostly error-free (other than FL-13), doesn't mean that we're in the clear.