Florida Democrat Loss Could Trigger Hearings on Voting Machines

The candidate declared the loser in last month's race for Florida's 13th US congressional district is now seeking the help of the incoming Congress she might have joined, in investigating whether an apparent 18,382 undercount by voting machines in Sarasota County might have prevented her from losing by just 369 votes.

If Christine Jennings gains the support of incoming Democratic committee heads - which, with the help of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, she's likely to do - the result could be a series of congressional hearings into the integrity of electronic voting machines nationwide.

Jennings' skepticism involves a statewide election where, in this one particular county, an overwhelming 15% of the registered electorate showed up to vote, and actually did vote for other races on the ballot, such as the governor's and lieutenant governor's race, but did not cast a vote for congressperson.

Republican Vern Buchanan was declared the victor last month after a simulated election, run by a team chosen by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, using machines from Election Systems & Software. No apparent problems with the mechanism were discovered.

Separate statistical analyses of the Sarasota County outcome, paired with exit polling and previous voting patterns, predict that Jennings should have won that county, which would have given her the congressional seat with a margin from anywhere between 600 to over 3,000 votes.

The Washington political publication Roll Call reported earlier this month that Jennings' travails sparked an independent analysis of the entire Florida vote, the results of which turned up a possible similar disproportionate undervote in Charlotte County, in the race for State Attorney-General.

While the final tally in that race wasn't nearly as close, the analysis determined the one factor linking that race to the congressional race was the placement of candidates' names on the touch-screen electronic ballot. Many voters might not have actually seen these races, and by the time they thought to ask where the "scroll-up" button was, their votes were already recorded as finalized.

But the possibility that the undervote problem could be due to a layout discrepancy rather than a mechanical deficiency, may have played into a circuit court judge’s decision late last month not to grant the Jennings campaign access to the source code from ES&S voting systems. The Miami Herald reported then that Leon County Circuit Court Judge William Gary denied Jennings’ attorneys’ motion to compel the state to release voting records for independent analysis, calling the motion “totally out of order.” The court held a hearing with regards to a second, similar request, a final ruling on which could come today or tomorrow. (CORRECTION: In an earlier draft of this story, our dates were wrong with regard to the circuit court hearings; we’ve since made corrections and regret the error.)

The US Constitution appoints the US House of Representatives as the final arbiter in cases of disputed elections. If Jennings loses her lawsuit against ES&S, as Judge Gary indicated she might, or if the lawsuit is dismissed, then that very act could trigger a full-scale congressional investigation.

The 13th congressional seat in Florida is ironically the one being vacated by Republican Katherine Harris, who certified George Bush the victor in the 2000 Florida presidential race over Al Gore, the single most critically contested election result in American history.