GAO: Fla. undervote not due to machines (2006 13th Congressional District election)

AP on Yahoo ^ | 2/6/08 | Mitch Stacy - ap

[NormsRevenge]

TAMPA, Fla. - Touch-screen voting machines likely performed properly and were not to blame for the large number of undervotes in a congressional race in 2006, as the loser has suggested, federal investigators said in a draft report obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office plans to present the report Friday to a House task force that has been investigating the 13th Congressional District election. Republican Vern Buchanan beat Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes to win the seat 15 months ago.

At issue was whether malfunctioning ATM-style voting machines failed to record more than 18,000 votes in the congressional election, or whether many voters — nearly 15 percent of the total — just skipped that particular race on their touch-screen ballots.

Jennings has asked Congress to throw out the election results, claiming that the Sarasota County voting machines failed to count the votes. Buchanan was declared the winner after two recounts and a state audit found no problems with the machines.

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, plans to tell task force members that while they can't provide "absolute assurance" that the voting machines didn't contribute to the large number of undervotes, testing "significantly reduced the possibility" that the machines were to blame. Voters themselves are more likely to blame, the report said.

A team of university computer experts who examined the machines after the election suggested the problem was voter confusion over a poorly designed ballot that had drawn complaints from voters. The District 13 race was listed at the top of the second page of the ballot without the same type of header that preceded other races on the ballot.

"GAO acknowledges the possibility that the large undervote in Florida's 13th Congressional District race could have been caused by factors such as voters who intentionally undervoted or voters who did not properly cast their ballots on the (voting machines), potentially because of issues relating to interaction between voters and ballot," the government report said.

"This is a huge victory for democracy and the people of the 13th District," said Hayden Dempsey, an attorney for Buchanan. "It tells losing candidates you cannot overturn an election simply because you don't like the outcome. ... It is significant to note that the GAO investigation was initiated at Jennings' request by a Democrat-controlled Congress, yet it reached the same conclusion as every other study over the past 15 months — the voting machines worked."

In part because of the District 13 dispute, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist pushed the Legislature to pass a bill that largely replaced touch-screen voting machines in the state with optical-scan machines that leave a paper trail.

Jennings, who never conceded the 2006 race, is challenging Buchanan for the seat again this year. Her campaign manager, Mitch Kates, said Wednesday that she feels her larger goal of assuring voters that all their votes are counted was accomplished.

"Her focus is in the 2008 election entirely," Kates said when asked whether Jennings would now drop her challenge of the 2006 contest. "She did what she needed to do to make sure voters had faith in the system and there was a paper trail."

In the August 2006 memo, Elections Systems & Software informed state and local election officials its iVotronic machines were exhibiting slow response times in highlighting candidates' names after voters made their selections.

But ES&S has contended that its machines were not to blame for the unusually high number of non-votes in Sarasota County. An ES&S spokeswoman didn't immediately return a call Wednesday night.

The GAO findings came as no surprise to Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning.

"We've been saying since the very first test was conducted after the election that the touch screens were functioning as they were designed to do," Ivey said.

[FlipWilson]

The undervotes were in a heavily Republican district. She is going to get her arse kicked this time and good.

[Enterprise]

I hope she does get it kicked and kicked good. As for “under votes,” we have voters in the nation who are too stupid to show up on the proper day, and show up one to two weeks early. As for Florida, Brit Hume said there were a couple of hundred people wanting voter information in Florida, and they were told that the election was last week. Jeez!

[ChildOfThe60s]

The term “undervote” is baloney. There are times I left a spot blank when I did not know anything about the two particular candidates. It was deliberate.