One Vote, One Unheard Voice

Via SecuirtyFocus - E-voting Flaws Put Florida in Spotlight Again

The U.S. House of Representatives seated Florida Republican Vern Buchanan last Thursday, essentially ending a contested election that has refocused attention on electronic voting machines and flaws in the widely adopted election technology.

In November's midterm elections, Buchanan edged out Democratic challenger Christine Jennings in the race for Florida's Congressional District 13 by a slim margin of 369 votes, according to the election results certified by the state. However, Jennings and some voters in Sarasota County, the most populous county in the congressional district, have filed lawsuits contesting the results.

The problem? A statistically improbable number of people in the pro-Jennings county--about 18,000 or 13 percent of all voters--failed to register a choice in the race. An undervote--as such failures are dubbed--seldom occurs in those numbers. While many people decide not to vote for any candidate in a race, high rates of undervoting usually happen only in the less publicized races. Voters fail to vote in major races generally far less than 5 percent of the time, according to voting experts.

Moreover, voters that did not use the county's election machines had a typical chance of not voting in the race, failing to make a selection only 2.5 percent of the time. On the e-voting machines used by the county, however, the story was different: Nearly 15 percent of the people who used the iVotronic systems manufactured by Election Systems & Software failed to vote in the Representative race.

"Both sides agree that thousands of votes were not counted and that those lost votes changed the outcome of this race," Kendall Coffey, attorney for the Jennings campaign, said in a statement. “We need to find out exactly what suppressed those votes, and we feel that the rights of Florida’s voters to have their votes count – and be counted accurately – is paramount in this case."

It's a result that even the winner could not dismiss. In a statement issued last week, Buchanan asked Jennings to acknowledge that he won the election but noted that the evidence did point to problems with the race.

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More reasons to push for some type of standardized open-source voting software suite.