this WILL go to court. This info isn't the whole article, the link is at the bottom. It is very interesting to read though. Kathy Dent is almost worse than Cruella. I know, hard to believe. Hope I didn't break any rules here by copying too much.
Read below...
The 2000 Florida race, which placed the phrase "hanging chad" into the national lexicon, gave George W. Bush the presidency by a margin of 537 votes. For Democrats, the race became a symbol for crooked balloting and partisan electioneering. The state outcome was certified by Florida's then-Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris -- who currently holds the seat in Ms. Dent's district.
"I see the irony," Ms. Dent said dryly.
The close race has given her political enemies opportunity to revisit her past actions. That includes the time in 2004 when she launched "Vote for a Vet," a drive to build voter participation. She sent out flyers that included a quote from Army veteran Frances Rice, a prominent Republican who called for leaders who support "lower taxes, limited government, a strong national defense, faith in God, and equal opportunities for all." Recriminations from Democratic voters were swift. Though Ms. Dent recalled the flyer, she still sees no harm in it. "I happen to be registered Republican, and I was just trying to do a good thing," she said.
But that was a sideline compared with Ms. Dent's decision to purchase new voting machines for Sarasota voters in 2001, after the state outlawed the mechanical ballot tabulators used in 2000. In 2001, in a move that drew little attention at the time, Ms. Dent settled on touch-screen voting devices, as did 14 of her counterparts in the 67-county state. Touch-screen machines are more expensive than other devices, but Ms. Dent says they carry two advantages. They don't allow voters to pick more than one choice in an election, which had led to many disqualified ballots in 2000. And at the time, touch-screen machines were the only ones that allowed blind people to enter voting booths unassisted.
But the machines leave no paper trail -- or at least one that gives clues as to voter intent. A touch-screen ballot is nothing but electrons. Its audit trail is a computer-generated spreadsheet that gives few clues about what a voter may have seen on the screen. Election activists say these machines are vulnerable to tampering, and the activists' suspicions are fed by the fact that the software that drives the machines is kept secret by manufacturers. In 2004, as part of a national campaign against the machines, picketers demonstrated outside Ms. Dent's office.
Ms. Dent remained defiant, however, remaking the ubiquitous "I voted" stickers that her office distributes to say, "I voted touchscreen." Many Democratic voters in Sarasota refused to wear them.
In the wake of the recent election, scores of activists have descended on the city, holding news conferences and presenting Sarasota -- and Ms. Dent by association -- as a shameful example of mistake-riddled balloting. "I assume she's intelligent and I assume she's competent and I don't know anything about her being crooked," said Reggie Mitchell, a lawyer for a nonprofit group called People for the American Way Foundation. "But this just doesn't smell right."
The shortcomings of the touch-screen machines in a recount have been on display this week at a cavernous warehouse on the outskirts of Sarasota, where Ms. Dent is supervising a voting canvass that many participants agree is largely a waste of energy. In a scene reminiscent of the 2000 postelection scene in Palm Beach, partisan volunteers have been sitting at 15 picnic tables, examining election documentation. But the examination of computer sheets does little to help determine voter intent and solve the mystery of the 18,000 uncast votes.
Ms. Dent said she will reluctantly bow to popular opinion and retire the touch-screen machines in favor of optical scanning devices. Those machines leave a clear paper trail: the original hand-marked ballot, which sometimes makes it easier to determine voter intent.
In fact, a probable cause of the undervoting is less likely skulduggery than mere bad design. The ballot, for reasons both technical and graphic, made it easy to overlook the congressional race. The chief ballot flaw, experts and voters said, was that it failed to clearly demarcate the congressional race from the U.S. Senate race that preceded it on the layout. Indeed, some early voters complained about the ballot's format in the run-up to Election Day.
Though Ms. Dent dismissed the early complaints as partisan sniping, she said she did instruct all her workers to tell voters that the race might be hard to see on the ballot. Whether the admonishment was effective is unknown. Many voters have said they weren't warned by election workers about the tricky ballot.
"Then they defied what I told them to do," Ms. Dent said of the election workers. But voters didn't escape her criticism. "I can't go in and hold their hand in the voting booth," she said. "I did everything humanly possible."
Write to Christopher Cooper at christopher.cooper@wsj.com1
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