Florida orders audit into 18,000 lost votes in FL-13 Congressional Race

[Herman Munster]

http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/breaking_news/15971698.htm

The state plans to audit Sarasota County's voting system after more than 18,000 votes were either not cast or not recorded in the Vern Buchanan-Christine Jennings race.

Florida Secretary of State Sue Cobb ordered the audit at the request of county Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent, who has blamed the large number of non-votes on voter error or choice.

Cobb informed Dent of the decision in a letter sent today.

"I am directing members of my staff to conduct an audit of Sarasota County's voting system and attendant procedures with regard to the United States Congressional District 13 race," Cobb wrote.

According to unofficial results, Buchanan beat Jennings by 368 votes out of more than 237,000 cast. But in Sarasota County, 18,382 ballots didn't have a vote in the race.

[efhmc]

1. Dem, of course. That is a bunch of lost votes.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

2. accountability, baby!

that's all we want.

[Blackhatjack]

3. These Explanations For The Missing Votes Are Ludicrous !!

Elections Supervisor Kathy Dent says it was voter error or voter choice that resulted in 18,000 nonvotes. Insinuating that the electronic voting machines worked just fine. ES&S said the problem was the State of Florida's, they had nothing to do with it.

All of this in the face of numerous complaints throughout the day, people were complaining that the DEM was not even listed on the ballot.

To make matters even more incredible, all the lesser offices got almost exactly the same number of votes as the other races except for this particular race. So you would have to believe all these 18,000 voters voted for everything on the ballot except for this one race.

Not a chance...

But now what do you do when it represents 13% of the votes cast, and the stated margin of victory was 368 votes? A recount of electronic voting machines w/o paper receipts/ballots --there is nothing to count, which is the basis of the complaint. The votes are missing.

Nothing short of a new election would be fair. But this is Florida ...

[Generic Other]

4. A pattern is developing just like all the other patterns

I believe that votes got shaved in lots of places. The exit polls say we did a lot better than we actually did.

[papau]

5. that was the 04 pattern in Florida - Dem votes shaved with new GOP votes

attributed to the 72 hr GOP GOTV effort that no one could see in actual human bodies voting GOP.

But the electronic voting machines do not check - unless they are like the one tested after complaints about missing votes in Virginia - and found to have a built in bias to report 1% of the votes switched - always to the same side. Of course, because the code is proprietary, the code could not be reviewed, so the machines was only tested by doing a demonstration.

But without a paper trail, good luck on proving anything to a judge since it seems GOP right wing judge and ability to do or understand math like statistics are not a common combination.

In this go round they just zero'd out the vote on a percentage of the voters. Better than a switch of the vote to the other side so we are making progress I guess. Maybe these electronic voting machines were optical and it was impossible to switch votes but easy to have a no mark read result.

[BeFree]

6. Pre-election Polls

 Average polls                   Expected     
         Early       Latest         NOV.7      
Dis    Dem GOP     Dem GOP       Dem GOP    
FL 13    49  47    49   47     51.4  48.6  

Almost all other pre-election polls were quite accurate. Is
this one off by almost three points? I don't think so.      

[magellan]

7. I also read in another article that the 18,382 ballots were undervotes

Meaning, as this article says, that 18,382 people allegedly filled out a ballot but didn't bother to vote for a Congressional Rep in this race.

RIGHT.....

[txindy]

8. They need a re-vote. Check the rolls and only let those who voted on 11/7 vote again.

Not that hard of a concept. Will it happen? Yeah, right. :eyes: