As Paul Kiel over at TPMmuckraker reports:
First, a little inappropriate commentary from the officials: in today's Sarasota Herald Tribune, David Drury, who's overseeing the audit, opined on its probable outcome:
... [Drury] said he expects "nothing" to be revealed from [the audit's examination of voting machines' source code].
"They're not going to find anything. It is my belief, and I rarely like to speculate but it is based upon the parallel testing, that there will be nothing found in the source code that will explain the undervote."
Hey, it's Florida! What do you expect from the election officials down there?
A little better than what we're getting, apparently. As People for the American Way protested in a statement reacting to Drury's remarks, one doesn't want "the guy in charge of the audit announcing his predictions about the outcome before the investigation of software code even begins."
Now where have we heard premature statements from elections officials before?
Kathy Dent is the Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections who oversaw the monumental and unprecedented screw-up in last month's election. She and her office ignored repeated warnings that something was wro...
...wait, did I just say "ignored repeated warnings?"
Yeah, now I remember! Kathy Dent was busy worrying about a county charter amendment that would have mandated scrapping touchscreen machines and replacing them with paper ballots, and ignored numerous warnings about irregularities.
Here's a Sarasota Herald-Tribune editorial from 11/04, the last day of early voting in Sarasota:
...A few citizens reported troubling screen oddities -- with check marks vanishing, or appearing when they shouldn't -- as they voted.
There is no way to absolutely confirm the reports, but they seem credible. So let this be a word to the wise: Check the touch-screen review page -- which sums up the chosen selections -- carefully before finalizing your vote. Notify poll workers if you have a problem.
...
That doesn't mean that concerns are invalid, however, and Sarasota County's supervisor of elections, Kathy Dent, should recognize that. The hard-working Dent has become quite defensive about touch screens, questioning the motives of citizens who reported the recent glitches. Her attitude undermines the sense of neutrality that is essential to an elections office.
A key reason for the defensiveness appears on the Sarasota County ballot: a proposed charter amendment that would move the county to a paper-ballot system with mandatory audits. The debate between Dent and the measure's proponents has gotten increasingly testy. The more personal it becomes, the less it helps voters.
...
With no hard proof, it's not clear that screen glitches have occurred in Sarasota. But they are a possibility, and unless voters and poll workers immediately notice a malfunction, there is a risk that some votes could be irretrievably miscast.
...
We don't want to overstate the risks, but the potential for trouble, especially on a busy election day, can't be waved off. In a close election, the validity of the results would be in question, with no good way to resolve the doubt. All things considered, paper is looking better and better.
The next day, Sunday, November 5, another article--this one headlined "Voting glitch prompts warning"--appeared in the Herald-Tribune:
...A proposed charter amendment on Sarasota County ballots would require the county to switch to a paper-ballot, optical-scan voting system by 2008.
The voters who complained say they picked Jennings, but the 13th Congressional District had no vote registered for either Jennings or Republican Vern Buchanan when a screen reviewing their votes came up.
The voters all said the touchscreen machines allowed them to go back to the 13th District race and make a selection, and their vote was recorded properly in the end.
Dent, the county's top elections official, said it is a good reminder for voters to carefully look over the review screen before hitting the red "vote" button and finalizing their votes.
"They need to go through each and every review screen," she said.
"On some of the ballots there are more than one review screen because of the length of the ballot."
She said that if voters think their vote in any race wasn't registered or they have any problem, they should ask the poll workers for help.
"Poll workers are there to help the voters," from making mistakes, Dent said. "It's always an effort between the poll workers and voters."
Dent said after she received the complaints, she checked the machines that were used and found them to be correctly calibrated.
But voters who complained say it was not user error, either.
Ellen Fedder of Longboat Key said she's confident she voted for Jennings correctly the first time.
She said she almost hit the "vote" button before her eye caught the review page warning that that no vote had been recorded in that race.
Fedder now worries that other voters might just hit the "vote" button without reviewing their choices.
"Make sure you are casting votes," Fedder said.
"I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat."
David Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for state representative for District 69, said the same thing happened to him when he voted Friday in Venice.
He said he's sure he went through the ballot carefully and was particularly interested in voting for Jennings, whom he had campaigned with. When his review page came up, his vote for Jennings hadn't been recorded, he said.
Alan Bandler Of Longboat Key said the same thing happened when he voted in downtown Sarasota.
"I asked the poll person, 'Is something wrong here?'" Bandler said. "I voted, and I know I voted and it didn't show up."
Poll workers have incident report logs to fill out if anyone has a problem, Dent said. There is also a telephone bank for workers to call, and those are recorded in a central location.
Dent said she's not worried about the 13th District race being affected because of the small number of complaints compared to the 24,000 people who had participated in early voting as of Friday morning.
She wasn't 'worried about the 13th District race being affected', she knew about but did not correct the problems at the polls, and she dismissed voters' complaints of machine malfunction because she took them personally.
Still, I'm glad that Dent took the threat of a flawed election so seriously before the fact, because, as she herself said at her press conference on November 8th,
"After the fact, there’s not a lot we can do about it."
Make sure that the Republican Supervisor of Election's unwillingness to do the job she was hired for doesn't mean that the people of the 13th District get stuck with a representative they didn't want to begin with.
Help the Christine Jennings Recount Fund keep up the fight for Florida's voters!
Sincerely,
JR Lentini
(Once again with) Christine Jennings for Congress