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Politics

Congressional race may have recount

By TIMES STAFF and TIMES WIRES
Published November 9, 2006

A recount in Florida involving Katherine Harris? No, it's not 2000 again, but the race to replace her in the U.S. House was so close that it likely will trigger an automatic recount.

This time, there won't be dimpled chads and butterfly ballots, and Harris won't be overseeing any disputes. Allegations of trouble centered on the touch screen voting machines she championed as Florida's elections chief to try to prevent a repeat of the presidential-vote nightmare.

Auto dealer Vern Buchanan hoped to keep the 13th District in GOP hands and declared victory with a 373-vote lead - 0.157 percent - in unofficial returns. But Democratic banker Christine Jennings refused to concede and her campaign said the ATM-style machines lost thousands of votes in Sarasota County.

"Dozens of voters sought us out. Intelligent, smart, responsible people that were trying to vote and couldn't get their vote recorded without a lot of difficulty," Jennings lawyer Kendall Coffey said. "We know something's wrong."

The Buchanan campaign did not return repeated phone calls Wednesday.

The recount issue surfaces, ironically, in a county that voted Tuesday to require a paper trail on its elections equipment. The Sarasota Alliance for Fair Elections, a local voting rights group, sued to get the question on Tuesday's ballot, and Kathy Dent, Sarasota County's supervisor of elections, urged voters to defeat it. The measure requires that voting machines in the county have a voter-verified paper trail and that regular audits are performed on the machines.

"This points out exactly why we need a paper ballot," alliance head Kindra Muntz said of the Jennings-Buchanan recount. More than 18,000 Sarasota County residents voted in other races, including the local hospital board race, but chose not to cast a ballot in the 13th District.

Dent said thousands of voters either overlooked the race, which was pushed to a second screen by a glut of minor U.S. Senate candidates on the ballot, or the voters decided not to vote for either candidate in a race that was marked by intense mudslinging.

[Last modified November 9, 2006, 00:56:00]