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How do you recount electronic votes?

By TAMARA LUSH
Published November 10, 2006

Fueled by a paper-thin margin in a race with national implications, a voting controversy in Sarasota has sparked a fast-growing statewide debate about the accuracy of electronic voting.

On Monday, state elections officials will oversee a recount in the 13th Congressional District race in Sarasota, between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings.

Already, a group of U.S. House staffers who oversee election disputes have arrived in Sarasota. The non-partisan group Common Cause has called for a re-do of the election. And Jennings, who lost by a scant 373 votes out of 237,861 cast, may take the matter to court.

Problems arose this week when 18,000 ballots registered an “undervote” in that one race — meaning that 18,000 voters, or about 14 percent, went to the polls and declined to cast a ballot in that contest. Other counties that voted in the 13th District, however, had undercount rates of 1 to 5 percent.

State and local voting officials have said that it was likely the intent of voters to skip that race — it was a particularly nasty one, with plenty of attack ads and mudslinging — and not an equipment malfunction. Undervotes occur in all races no matter the voting method, officials say.

Yet Gov. Bush on Friday said the unusually high number of voters who didn’t choose a candidate in a congressional race in Sarasota County was worth investigating.

“This is obviously something we need to look into, and very quickly,” Bush said.

Bush and others are aware that voting glitches in Florida resurrect the dark days of the 2000 election, during which Bush’s brother was elected president after an arduous recount. Electronic machines, which a majority of Florida voters now use, were meant to end the widely-mocked “hanging chads.”

“The problem is: how there are significant undervotes like that?” he asked. “It may be that was simply the voters’ wish, but if there’s evidence to suggest otherwise, we’ll move on that.”

Voting experts offer different theories. Some say it could have been a programming malfunction. Others say that the touch screen pad might not have been calibrated correctly.

One problem is that electronic machines, unlike the old punch ballots, do not leave obvious clues about the voter’s intent.

Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent did not return calls for comment.

Kindra Muntz, a Venice voter who has been pushing Sarasota County officials for a paper trail on the electronic machines, said the ballot layout may have been confusing. The congressional race appeared at the top of the page near a sentence in bold type that may have distracted voters.

“I think there should be another election,” said Muntz, whose group, Sarasota Alliance for Fair Elections won a court battle to get the issue of verified voting on Tuesday’s ballot. The measure passed.

Elections Systems & Software, the Omaha company that manufactures the voting machines, issued a statement Friday.

“ES&S was not present during the election, so it would be inappropriate to speculate on the situation,” spokeswoman Jill Freidman-Wilson said. “However, we have been in contact with the Supervisor of Elections who has emphasized that the voting equipment functioned well.

“The touch screen system used in Sarasota County provides unlimited opportunity for a voter to make and change selections before a ballot is cast. Therefore, according to the Supervisor of Elections, undervotes were a result of an intentional choice not to make a selection in the congressional race or unintentional omission of a selection.”

ES&S machines are used in several Florida counties, including Pasco and Miami Dade. Pasco Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning said he has not seen abnormal undercounts in his county.

Yet according to an Orlando Sentinel analysis of the 24 Florida counties using ES&S machines, three counties — Lee, Sumter and Charlotte — had high undervotes in the attorney general’s race, though not enough to change the outcome.

And in the March, 2005 special election on slot machines in Miami-Dade county, there were 1,246 undervotes out of 154,554 total; yet the slot machine question was the only thing on the ballot. It was later discovered that at least 477 of those undervotes were due to a faulty computer program.

While some voters have told the Jennings campaign that they couldn’t find the race on the ballot, several voters told the newspaper that they skipped it on purpose.

“The campaign was so ugly, so nasty, by the time the election came along I decided I couldn’t trust either one of them,” Cheryl Crawford told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

Ivan Kristjanson, a 73-year-old retiree, noticed that at the end of his electronic ballot that he had not cast a ballot in the congressional race.

“I figured I didn’t push the screen hard enough,” he said. He went back and re-voted in that race, and only became concerned a few minutes later when he was in his car listening to a caller on a radio show who had had the same problem. He went back to the polling precinct.

“This is going to be a very serious situation,” Kristjanson said he told the poll workers. “Especially if there’s a close race.”

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report. Tamara Lush can be reached at 727-893-8612 or at lush@sptimes.com.

[Last modified November 10, 2006, 21:08:27]