Analysis: Ballots favored Dems: Sarasota's 'undervotes' were examined in 5 state races.

[ProSense]

Analysis: Ballots favored Dems

Sarasota's 'undervotes' were examined in 5 state races.

Jim Stratton | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted November 22, 2006

The group of nearly 18,000 voters that registered no choice in Sarasota's disputed congressional election solidly backed Democratic candidates in all five of Florida's statewide races, an Orlando Sentinel analysis of ballot data shows.

Among these voters, even the weakest Democrat -- agriculture-commissioner candidate Eric Copeland -- outpaced a much-better-known Republican incumbent by 551 votes.

The trend, which continues up the ticket to the race for governor and U.S. Senate, suggests that if votes were truly cast and lost -- as Democrat Christine Jennings maintains -- they were votes that likely cost her the congressional election.

Republican Vern Buchanan's 369-vote victory was certified by state officials Monday. His camp says that, although people may have skipped the race -- intentionally or not -- there is no evidence that votes went missing.

But the results of the Sentinel analysis, two experts said, warrant additional investigation.

"Wow," University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato said. "That's very suggestive -- I'd even say strongly suggestive -- that if there had been votes recorded, she would have won that House seat."

David Dill, an electronic-voting expert at Stanford University, put it this way: "It seems to establish with certainty that more Democrats are represented in those undervoted ballots."



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[thereismore]

1. wow is right. nt

[ChiciB1]

2. I KNEW IT ALL THE TIME!!

Kathy Dent, she CHEATS!!! And ALL the rest of the DAMN Gang!!!

[acmejack]

3. Well fancy that!

Is this the crookedest house district in the US? There is just no way they are going to let it fall into Democratic hands. As Mr. Stalin so aptly observed; "It is who counts the votes"!

[acmejack]

4. Link to good Salon story (Subscription Site)

Nov. 22, 2006 | The recount is over in the 13th Congressional District in Florida. The lawyers have won -- and the Democrat has lost. As in the presidential election of 2000, that loss appears to have been caused by a glitch in the voting process. But this time, the controversy centers on the very electronic voting machines many counties around the country purchased after the 2000 election in hopes of avoiding the sort of debacle that produced Bush v. Gore.

On Monday, Florida election officials named Republican Vern Buchanan the victor in the race for the House seat that Katherine Harris -- the Katherine Harris who was Florida's secretary of state during the 2000 recount -- vacated to run for the Senate. The Florida Elections Canvassing Commission, which is made up of Gov. Jeb Bush and two other elected Republican officials, said that the results of the recount showed Buchanan had beaten Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes in a race where nearly 240,000 votes were cast. The commission awarded the victory to Buchanan despite the fact that the mystery of more than 18,000 missing votes has not been resolved.

Neither candidate in the race is backing down. On Monday, after the Elections Canvassing Commission announced its decision, Democrat Christine Jennings filed suit in state court. Jennings' suit asked the judge to declare her the winner or hold a new election, and charged that there was "pervasive malfunctioning" of the touch-screen voting machines in the race.

That afternoon, Buchanan held a press conference calling on Jennings to concede: "The people have spoken, and I have won this election," Buchanan said. "I won on election night, I won in the machine recount, and I won in the manual recount." Jennings responded with her own press conference, where she declared, "The voters of Sarasota and the entire country deserve answers about what went wrong with this voting system ... Our next representative to the U.S. Congress should be chosen by the will of the people, and not by a problem in the voting machine." On Tuesday, voting rights groups filed their own lawsuit demanding a new election.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/11/22/florida_13/index.html?source=newsletter

[Peace Patriot]

5. The FL-13 election was a goddamned crock of shit! And if the courts or

Congress don't do something about it--or if the people of FL-13 don't do something about, in lieu of anybody else--we don't have a democracy any more. This should be the death knell of ES&S and Diebold election theft machines, and all TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code in our election system. 18,000 undervotes for Congress in a Democratic sweep is UNFRIGGING-BELIEVABLY FRAUDULENT!