Much ado about Fla. e-voting

The reluctant touch screen now joins the hanging chads and butterfly ballots of Florida election scandal paraphernalia.

More than 21,000 electronic ballots cast Nov. 7 in the 13th Congressional District race failed to record a selection to replace Rep. Katherine Harris, triggering accusations of machine malfunction and demands for a revote of what voter advocacy groups call a greatly flawed election.

The latest chapter in this state’s history of electoral irregularities has rekindled the fiery partisan confrontations that followed the 2000 presidential vote.

Harris, then secretary of state, certified that election for George W. Bush over Al Gore, despite unresolved disputes about tens of thousands of voters’ intentions.

“Undervotes” -- the term for when voters are recorded as skipping a race -- were seen most notably in the 13th District’s Sarasota County, where Democrat Christine Jennings enjoyed her strongest support over Republican Vern Buchanan. Eighteen percent, or almost 1 in 5 ballots, showed no vote in the race, which Buchanan has claimed by 400 votes.

Suspicions about the electronic voting machines were fueled by reports from hundreds of voters whose ballot summaries showed no choice was registered in the House race.

Republicans and elections administrators attribute the undervotes in the 13th District race to an ugly campaign that turned off voters.

“Machines don’t make mistakes,” Sarasota County elections supervisor Kathy Dent said Wednesday at a news conference.

She said that the Nov. 7 results had been confirmed in a machine recount and that she was “not anticipating that the results are going to change” in a manual recount expected to run through the end of the week.

Critics of the electronic voting systems say those retabulations will simply duplicate the contested results -- if the votes were never recorded, they won’t be there to be recounted.

That is the hope of Florida Republicans, who contend Buchanan won, if only by a 0.2% margin. And it is the fear of Democrats and voting-rights groups, who contend that the undervote rate -- which is about eight times larger than other counties’ and previous elections’ -- is clear evidence of a technical problem.

Susan Pynchon, founder of the nonpartisan Florida Fair Elections Coalition, called the machine recount “a sham,” and urged elections supervisors across the state to restore paper balloting or at least some hard-copy record for voters.

Reginald Mitchell, Florida legal counsel for the nonpartisan People for the American Way Foundation, said: “Something clearly went very wrong in Sarasota County.”

Mitchell said hundreds of district voters had complained to poll workers and the political parties of election-day difficulties getting the machines to accept their choices. He announced a town hall meeting here tonight to register individual testimony on the machines.

That evidence will be used to back judicial challenges if, as expected, the recounts are the same as the election day totals. Florida law requires a recount in any instance in which the margin is less than a quarter of a percent.

Florida Republicans, who hold all major statewide offices including the Division of Elections, called on Jennings to concede.

“With the first vote recount concluded, it is clear that Vern Buchanan continues to maintain a wide and growing margin of votes over Christine Jennings,” asserted Florida Republican Party Chairwoman Carole Jean Jordan, referring to 22 votes he picked up in the recount.

Jennings has not conceded. Both candidates went to Washington this week for freshman congressional orientation.

Dent has until Saturday to certify the results for Sarasota County, one of five in the 13th District and the only one with the inordinate share of undervotes. The Florida Election Canvassing Commission is expected to certify statewide results Monday.

The Jennings campaign and the voter advocacy groups want the iVotronics machines supplied by Omaha-based Election Systems & Software tested to determine whether a programming error or technical malfunction was responsible for some of the undervotes. The Democratic campaign won a court order Tuesday to sequester the machines until a bipartisan auditing team can inspect them.

In Sarasota County, the district’s most populous region, Jennings won 53% of the recorded vote. If that percentage held through the undervotes, she would pick up about 900 votes, more than twice what she would need to overtake Buchanan.

The bipartisan audit committee planned today to begin reviewing the ballot images from all 21,000 undervotes in the five-county congressional contest in an effort to determine voter intention, said Alexander P. Heckler, representing the Jennings campaign on the review team.

If a significant share of the undervotes occurred on ballots voting a straight party ticket, for example, that would bolster contentions that the machinery or its software malfunctioned.

Harris -- who was defeated in her race for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson -- and ballot-counting controversy have not been the only common elements in the 13th District vote and the 2000 presidential race. Attorney Kendall Coffey, who represented Gore in the legal battles six years ago, has taken up Jennings’ cause in demanding investigation of the suspect machinery.

And Florida State University professor Alec Yasinsac, who wore a “Bush Won” button as he fought fiercely against Democratic demands for a recount in 2000, has been assigned by the state’s Republican administration to carry out inspection of the Sarasota voting machines.

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carol.williams@latimes.com