October 03, 2007

"GAO Wants to Test Controversial Florida Voting Machines"

"The Government Accountability Office, which has been looking into what happened to about 18,000 votes in a controversial Florida election, released a preliminary report today saying it can't exclude the possibility that voting machines were responsible for the undervotes in that race. The GAO says that initial tests on the voting machines conducted by Florida election officials after the election were insufficient and that the GAO needs to conduct more tests. Though the GAO also said that such tests may not be able to provide absolute assurance that the machines were or were not at fault.

"Absolute assurance is impossible to achieve because we are unable to recreate the conditions of the election in which the undervote occurred," the report notes. But further tests could "reduce the possibility that the iVotronic DREs were the cause of the undervote and shift attention to the possibilities that the undervote was the result of intentional actions by the voter or voters that did not properly cast their votes on the voting system."

The report, published here provides details about how the GAO has conducted its investigation so far, including the documents and software it has examined.

To recap this ongoing story, last November Republican Representative Vern Buchanan beat Democrat Christine Jennings in the Florida 13th congressional race by fewer than 400 votes. More than 230,000 votes were counted.

This might have been the end of the story if not for the fact that some 18,000 ballots cast in Sarasota County showed no vote cast in that particular race. The so-called undervote rate in the county for that race was 13 percent, more than double what it was in any other county. There are five Florida counties in the 13th congressional district. The undervote rates in the other four counties was between 2 and 6 percent, indicating that something different may have occurred in Sarasota to cause the unusually high undervote rate."

The story is here.

Posted by Randy Riddle at October 3, 2007 07:54 AM