Lose An Election? Sue!
There's still one contested election from the midterm, and that's the Florida Congressional District 13 seat. This district covers a Republican-heavy area of Gulfcoast Florida south of Tampa Bay that includes Bradenton, Sarasota, and Venice.
The Republican candidate, Vern Buchanan, won the election by the narrowest of margins, less than 1%. By state law a mandatory recount is required, making the challenger's suit unnecessary. After the recount Buchanan won again, with a slightly higher margin. But that didn't satisfy Democrat Christine Jennings, who now has added the manufacturer of the voting machines to her lawsuit.
At issue is the intent of some 18,000 "undervotes" - people who voted in the election but chose neither Buchanan nor Jennings for the congressional seat. Pending the outcome of the election, both candidates went to Washington to attend the freshman orientation.
However, even having lost the election twice, Jennings will not concede. To make matters worse, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House-elect, allowed the unelected Jennings to cast a vote on a Judicial Committee matter.
You can't recount without a paper trail, and it would be stupid to trust the count when there's no statistically possible way that it's accurate. There's no way on earth that only 1400 people skipped the first race on the ballot, 1800 people skipped the third race on the ballot, and 18,400 people skipped the second race. There's no way that 3% of absentee voters (using paper ballots) have an undervote but 13% of touchscreen voters have one. You seem very quick to ignore the extreme problems with those numbers.
ReplyDeleteWell, of course you can have a recount with electronic voting. Electronic machines have built-in monitoring within their source code which allows election officials to review the performance of each machine. In a democratic society, one must have some faith in the electrorial process; that the polling is accurate, whether by punched paper, electronic touchscreen, or raised hands.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Election Systems and Software Inc officials, quotes of whom were linked in my post:
"The state Division of Elections has copies of the so-called "source code," user and operator manuals, and other software for the machines used in Sarasota County, although the state maintains the information belongs to ES&S, which considers the codes to be proprietary."
"We see this as a red herring," said Ken Fields, a spokesman for ES&S. "The fact is, there is already a great deal of public scrutiny for every element of the voting system, including the source code. The certification processes at the federal and state level carefully assess each piece of the voting system. As part of the federal certification process, every line of our source code is reviewed and tested before it is ever used in an election."
Now, even though I personally feel that a punched paper ballot is the best and surest way to monitor elections, I am not worried that electronic machines will necessarily produce a miscount. They've withstood trial by fire in the last several elections. News sources state that there was a massive "no-vote" attitude in this race from both democrats and republicans, due in part to the aggressive nature of the campaign for the 13th district house seat. Particularly cited were the last minute phone calls from both candidates, which seemed to have aggrevated some 18,000 peole to skip that race.
Having said that, I do take issue with the trend among some to have a "sue-until-we-win" attitude. We seem to be seeing more and more of that in the last six years. We've even exported it to Mexico, as evidenced by the obstruction in the presidential inauguration there last week. This makes for a costly process and degrades the democratic process by placing election outcomes in the hands of unelected judges rather than the electorate. Even the editorial board of the Tampa Tribune, for instance, today called for Jennings to concede.