Sarasota Herald Tribune - On day 1 of vote test, numbers don’t add up

SARASOTA COUNTY -- An audit of the county's touch-screen voting machines Tuesday found several discrepancies, most prominently in the disputed 13th Congressional District race, but state elections officials said it is unclear whether the problems were the result of human or machine error.

All four voting machines that officials used to simulate the Nov. 7 election had miscounts, and three of them had miscounts in the District 13 race.

Republican Vern Buchanan was certified the winner last week over Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes.

But there were more than 18,000 undervotes in the race, prompting a recount and now a state audit.

The voting machines tested Tuesday were among those that the state programmed for the county, but were not used in the Nov. 7 election.

State officials selected four precincts, and had their workers vote to reflect proportionately how votes were cast in the actual election.

Of the 251 ballots cast, five additional votes were counted for Jennings, including three extra votes in one precinct. There were also miscounts in five other races.

"Most likely it's human error," said Jenny Nash, spokesperson for the State Division of Elections.

Representatives for both Jennings and Buchanan said Tuesday's results support their original contentions.

"They said beforehand in all likelihood there would be human error," said Buchanan lawyer Hayden Dempsey.

Jennings spokeswoman Kathy Vermazen said she found the results "intriguing."

"This does not reduce the significant concerns that the campaign has had and the voters have had," she said.

Election officials and observers have cited several possible reasons for the unusually large undervote in the race, including an intentional decision by voters not to cast a vote, a glitch in the software and poor ballot design.

The potential for problems with the touch-screen ballot design prompted Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent to send an e-mail to precinct clerks before Election Day instructing them to tell voters not to miss the District 13 race.

State officials said Tuesday's errors could be the result of a faulty script or mistakes on the part of the voters -- who were Division of Elections employees.

This morning state audit officials will begin trying to figure out what went wrong before Friday's simulated election, which will test machines that were used on Nov. 7.

They will review the scripts and look at video tapes of voters casting ballots on each machine, said the Division of Elections' Nash.

State officials, who tallied the votes Tuesday by printing each machine's results tape and measured the totals against those the machines they were mimicking had tabulated on election day, did not mention the possibility that the problem was in the machines.

Dent, who requested the state audit, was more than 100 miles away from the process Tuesday.

At an Orlando meeting of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, of which she is president-elect, Dent said she did not think Tuesday's results are significant.

"I would expect that," she said, adding that voting discrepancies have cropped up when her office has run test scripts before elections. "There are human people putting in the votes."

David Drury, the bureau chief at the Division of Elections Voting Systems Certification, created a test script using logs from machines that were used on election day to generate the ballots, Nash said.

Four of the machines were set up to mirror the ballots in precincts 76, 105, 113 and 118.

The ballots were loaded onto the machines once the test precincts were selected.

Buchanan had the state randomly choose precincts 76 and 113 in Sarasota, both of which experienced about a 15 percent undervote rate in the District 13 race.

Jennings selected precinct 105 in North Port, which reported a 28 percent rate, and 118 in North Port, which had the highest number of undervotes at nearly 30 percent.

On a fifth machine, officials tested some of the scenarios voters who claimed to have trouble casting a ballot in the District 13 race said they encountered on Election Day.

It featured the ballot of precinct 117, which reported a 24 percent undervote rate.

Forty-five ballots were cast on the machine Tuesday, with eight undervotes in the congressional contest.

The polls opened at 7 a.m. Tuesday.

The touch-screens hung in a row on a wall, a camera fixed behind each. Two state elections employees sat in front of each 12-inch machine.

One read a script, "Touch the Jennings race. Now change it to Buchanan. Hit review." Another made the selections.

The twelve "voters" rotated in and out in 20 minute shifts. They cast ballots in ten different scenarios, two that resulted in votes for Buchanan, six for Jennings and two for an undervote.

After working through each ballot, voters looked over the review screen, recorded their selections on a sheet paper and waited for the next time their instructions told them to vote.

Outside the 25-by-15 voting room, lawyers, journalists, campaign officials and curious residents peered through two long windows.

The voting action drew the occasional yawn and stretch of the torso in the mostly silent the warehouse.

Noise was mostly reserved for the occasional television reporter's dispatch and the intermittent "click" noise elicited when voters checked boxes.

A mid-afternoon jolt shot briefly through the still air Tuesday and hinted at the biting campaign that the candidates at the center of the audit had fought.

Jennings entered the warehouse at about 2:30 p.m to observe the mechanics of voting.

"There's your race," said one of her lawyers, Sam Hirsch, to Jennings, who nodded.

"This could go on for months, and I'm prepared for that," she later told reporters. "I will never give up."

Not to be outshone, Buchanan's press secretary, Sally Tibbetts, dropped in to blanket the media with news releases as Jennings was wrapping up her hour at the audit.

Dent, whose conference was scheduled long before the Nov. 7 election and its contested results, said her competent staff rendered her presence in Sarasota unnecessary during the state-run audit.