What a mess. Yesterday, we found out that a staged test, by election officials, focused on voting properly, still dug up a bunch of voting mistakes. The knee-jerk reaction at the time was that it was all "human error", even though if election officials can't vote properly, how are regular voters supposed to?
Well, it's gotten worse for them.
Florida elections officials now have two mysteries to solve.
Before figuring out what, if anything, went wrong in Sarasota County's Nov. 7 congressional election, state officials must determine what happened in a test conducted Tuesday.
That test, a simulated election using state elections employees acting as voters, was supposed to help uncover any glitches with the county's electronic touch-screen voting machines.
Instead, the Florida Division of Elections spent Wednesday studying the test results -- with limited success. Officials blamed human error for two of the 10 discrepancies in the tallies from the simulated election. But they couldn't explain the others, including five involving the disputed 13th Congressional District race, where Republican Vern Buchanan was certified the winner over Democrat Christine Jennings by fewer than 400 votes.
Yet, even though they don't know why 80 percent of the errors happened, they continue to insist, despite any evidence, that experienced election officials testing the machines were at fault.
"We feel confident it's not machine error," said Jenny Nash, spokeswoman for the state elections office, echoing a statement she made a day earlier.
That drew a sharp rebuke from one prominent computer expert and election reform advocate.
"I think it's disturbing that the state of Florida would dismiss unexplained discrepancies as human error," said David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University. "I think they're prejudging it. That worries me."
Meanwhile, Dems are already planning hearings on the mess:
"What happened in Sarasota really does highlight the issue," said Howard Gantman, communications director for U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein, a Democrat from California who is already vowing to hold hearings on the voting issues early in 2007.
With Democrats winning control of the House and Senate this year, Feinstein is in line to become the chairwoman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which has jurisdiction over federal election regulations.
Gantman said he is certain Sarasota officials will be called in to testify.
Feinstein also intends to re-introduce legislation in the new year to require all voting systems to have verifiable paper trails, Gantman said.
In the House, two members have called for new legislation mandating paper trails and a spokesman for incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the issue is high on her agenda for the new Congress. Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said what happened in Sarasota underscores why the need for paper trails will be a priority for the speaker-elect.