Audit of Fla. 13 Voting Machines Ends as Fight Rages On
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The testing of the electronic voting machines in FloridaÃ¢ÂÂs disputed 13th Congressional District race is expected to conclude Friday night. State elections officials then will proceed with additional audit activities to determine whether voting machine errors affected the outcome Ã¢ÂÂ certified by state officials as a narrow 369-vote victory for the Republican nominee, car dealership owner Vern Buchanan.
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A federal judge rejected a lawsuit aimed at forcing Florida authorities to affix printers to touch-screen voting machines, but admitted it would be better to have a paper vote record.
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The bizarre disappearance of tens of thousands of ballots has fueled worries over Florida's ability to avert a repeat of the chaos of 2000, when Americans were kept guessing for 36 days who won the election.
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SARASOTA, Fla., Nov. 28 -- Almost since the time the votes were tallied here on election night, the race for Florida's 13th Congressional District has been surrounded by a contentious mystery:
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Touch-screen voting machines in the Sunshine State insist 18,000 voters had no preference in a congressional race won by fewer than 400 votes. A recount is under way, but that just means printing a hard copy of the contested ballots. By Kim Zetter.
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WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - A computer crash that forced a pre-election test of electronic voting machines to be postponed was trumpeted by critics as proof of the balloting technology's unreliability...
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About 46,000 people are registered to vote in two states, New York and Florida, a violation of both states' laws that could affect the outcome of the November presidential election, according to an investigation by the Daily News.
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A congressional race that was so close it triggered an automatic recount finally wrapped up Monday with officials confirming Republican Rep. Deborah Pryce had won.
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The final outcome of the House contest in FloridaÃ¢ÂÂs 13th District has now been delayed for more than a month. Democratic nominee Christine Jennings has filed official complaints and lawsuits seeking to overturn state election officialsÃ¢ÂÂ Nov. 20 certification of Republican Vern Buchanan as the winner of the open-seat contest, by a margin of 369 votes.
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Electoral authorities in Florida say they will resend tens of thousands of absentee ballots on Friday, after failing to determine the fate of 58,000 ballots that were sent out but not received by voters.
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Although Florida election officials are chastized for being lax in monitoring the company that built a lousy database for tracking felons and dead voters, an internal audit concludes that there was no intent to disenfranchise anyone.
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A state rule barring Florida counties with touch-screen voting from conducting manual recounts is at odds with state law, according to an administrative law judge ruling in a lawsuit against the state.
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Six days before Election Day, Florida is again struggling with questions about potential voting irregularities.
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After a series of tests on e-voting machines, a U.S. government auditor still doesn&#39;t know what contributed to 18,000 unmarked ballots in a Florida congressional race in 2006.The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) checked the firmware and the ballot display and ran calibration tests on a sample of Election Systems &amp; Software (ES&amp;S) iVotronic e-voting machines, the agency said in a report released Friday. Those tests, combined with others done by the GAO and state of Florida, &quot;have significantly reduced the possibility that the iVotronic [machines] were the cause of the undervote,&quot; said the report, authored by Nabajyoti Barkakati, acting chief technologist for the GAO&#39;s applied research and methods division.The GAO believes the ES&amp;S machines have been adequately tested, the report says. &quot;Given the complex interaction of people, processes, and technology that must work effectively together to achieve a successful election,&quot; other factors, including intentional undervotes or ballot interaction problems, may have caused the undervote, the GAO said.Democratic candidate Christine Jennings lost by 369 votes in the 2006 13th Congressional District race, but more than 18,000 people who cast votes in other district races failed to have votes recorded in the congressional race. About 4,000 more votes were recorded in the Sarasota County Southern District Hospital Board election than in the House race.Jennings is again running for the congressional seat this year.The GAO report &quot;leaves most of the major questions unanswered,&quot; said the Verified Voting Foundation, an advocacy group critical of e-voting machines. The GAO report didn&#39;t address potential problems with touch-screen sensitivity and low batteries, or reports of undervotes in other races, the foundation said in its own report , based on a leaked copy of the GAO report.&quot;The GAO report leaves us with almost as many questions as before, and the most important one -- what caused the ... undervote problem -- is left unanswered,&quot; the foundation report says. &quot;The nature of the complex voting system in question, and the difficulty in auditing such a system, may mean such questions will remain indefinitely, but it is clear that more can and should be done to resolve the outstanding issues.&quot;The foundation suggested auditors could conduct more tests, including tests of touch-screen sensitivity and a check for software bugs beyond the GAO&#39;s check that the software matched versions certified by Florida.&quot;As someone who&#39;s interested in what happened in this election, my questions aren&#39;t answered,&quot; said David Dill, the foundation&#39;s founder and a computer science professor at Stanford University. &quot;I don&#39;t think we&#39;re going to get any idea about what happened in that election without a lot more investigation.&quot;The GAO report &quot;cannot be interpreted as a clean bill of health for the machines,&quot; Dill added. &quot;They did three little tests ... out of a spectrum of a lot of things, and they aren&#39;t the most important things to look at,&quot; he said.ES&amp;S, in a statement, said the GAO report shows its machines &quot;performed well&quot; in the election. GAO&#39;s findings echo studies by Florida State University and the Florida Department of State, both saying there was &quot;no evidence&quot; of ES&amp;S machine malfunction, the company said. &quot;The collective findings of these and other tests demonstrate that Sarasota County&#39;s voting system performed exactly as it was designed to function,&quot; the company said.The Election Technology Council, a trade group representing ES&amp;S and three other e-voting vendors, said the report suggests that a paper ballot to accompany the e-voting machines wouldn&#39;t necessarily solve problems. The Verified Voting Foundation and other groups have pushed for printouts to be used with e-voting machines.Elections include people, processes and technology, said David Beirne, the council&#39;s executive director. &quot;Paper is not a magic bullet,&quot; he said. &quot;It can provide an additional layer of verification for the voter, but it alone is not going to satisfy all of the stakeholders, which is why it is important to look at all of the circumstances surrounding an election to determine its overall performance.&quot;The GAO report shows the need for assurance tools that verify the operation of the e-voting machines&#39; software, Beirne added.
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Voters line up to check in before using the electronic voting booths, foreground, on the first day of early voting Monday, Oct. 18, 2004 at the Supervisor of Elections Office in West Palm Beach, Fla.
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A federal court in Florida ruled that the source code in ES&S electronic voting machines cannot be examined in an effort to find out why 18,000 votes were apparently not counted.
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An overhaul in how states and localities record votes and administer elections since the Florida recount battle six years ago has created conditions that could trigger a repeat -- this time on a national scale -- of last week's Election Day debacle in the Maryland suburbs, election experts said.