FL-13: Dem Candidate Robbed of Victory by Computer Glitch/Hack?

Great Debates
1

In the race for Katherine Harris’ old seat, Republican Vern Buchanan appears to have edged Democrat Christine Jennings by 373 votes. But there’s something rather funny in the voting: it looks like there’s a whole bunch of missing House votes in the county where Jennings did best.

FL-13 includes all or part of five counties: all of Sarasota County, where Jennings ran strongly; all but a sliver of Manatee County, where Buchanan did well; all of two rural counties, Hardee and Desoto; and a sliver of Charlotte County.

Florida had a senatorial race (the one where Katherine Harris lost) and a gubernatorial race at the same time as this one. In the other four counties in the district, there was little drop-off from the gubernatorial/senatorial voting to the House voting. But in Sarasota, the drop-off was enormous:



[Manatee](http://www.votemanatee.com/results.asp?DateID=55&ElectionID=28)
Gov  100,059
Sen    99,519
Hse    98,068

[Sarasota](http://www.srqelections.com/results/gen2006sum.htm)
Gov  140,397
Sen  140,537
Hse  123,901

[Hardee](http://www.hardeecountyelections.com/Results/GEMS%20ELECTION%20SUMMARY%20REPORT%20GENERAL%2006.pdf)
Gov      4,533
Sen      4,531
Hse      4,314

DeSoto
[Gov](http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006//pages/results/states/FL/G/00/county.000.html)      6,592
[Sen](http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006//pages/results/states/FL/S/01/county.000.html)      6,612
[Hse](http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006//pages/results/states/FL/H/13/county.000.html)      6,518

[Charlotte](http://www.charlottevotes.com/Elections/Reports/Gen06summary.HTM)
Gov    55,260
Sen    54,991
Hse    54,630

The Manatee House totals include 3,674 votes from the part of FL-11 that’s in Manatee County. The Charlotte House totals are mostly from FL-16 (Mark Foley’s old district!) and FL-14.

But the thing is, the drop-offs between the two marquee races and the House races are 1% in Charlotte, 1% in DeSoto, 2% in Manatee, 5% in Hardee - and 12% in Sarasota.

And from my sampling of Sarasota’s precinct-by-precinct results, it doesn’t look like the problem with the House undervotes stems from some ‘bad’ precincts; it appears to be across the board within the county.

So was there a glitch? A hack? Seems like something funny went on in Sarasota County on election night.

2

You are not the only one who has noticed this. Here is another story on it that I found in a quick google search. It seems that the electronic ballot in that county was badly-designed so that voters could easily miss the Congressional race. Wonderful!

3

Here’s more from the liberal group People for the American Way. It is hard to tell if it is just a poorly-designed ballot or a real glitch…but it seems pretty likely that there was something bad. I find it particularly disturbing how many people (including a spokesman for the Florida secretary of state) are willing to just say, “Well, maybe it was a protest vote” or something like that without giving any explanation of why the voting pattern would be so different in one county than the others. It sort of reminds me of the excuses regarding the Palm Beach County butterfly ballot fiasco in 2000! I was among those who admitted that I really didn’t know if anything could be realistically done to remedy that problem but what really pissed me off were those people who tried to deny that there was even a problem when there was overwhelming statistical evidence (backed up by testimonials of voters) that there was. Denialism runs deep.

4

Oh, the good news is that the Florida Secretary of state has apparently now come to her senses and agreed to investigate what happened there.

5

Since the problems reportedly are cutting both ways around the county, and with hundreds of people complaining about the touch-screens, it seems likely this is a bit like the butterfly ballot. Poor design, and poorer implementation. Cripes I’m glad I don’t have to vote in FL.

6

Are the designers of voting machines congenitally stupid or something?

Build a freaking database, each race’s candidates showing as clearly marked checkboxes (mutually exclusive choices where appropriate, e.g., it won’t LET you cast more votes than you’re entitled to) , scroll bars, a review button at the bottom, a final preview to look back at how you voted, a warning if any races were passed with no vote (in case they were clicked past by accident), and a done / record vote to record the vote both to local drive and to networked system where state & national results are tallied in realtime, print a paper copy date&timestamped & locationstamped & machine-kiosk-IDstamped, wipe the screen, and make a nice audible “ding!”, a huge “Thank you for VOTING” onscreen, and automatically open the curtains.

Attach a mouse. Show a traditional mouse-cursor arrow on the freaking screen. Make any elements that are clicked on give compellingly obvious visual feedback: an X in a checkbox, a button darkens with obvious highlighting, etc.;

Put nice hi-res monitors, physically big enough to show the names very legibly. For the visually impaired, headphones that will read off choices, accepting a mouse-click as a vote after an audio repeat-and-confirm.
Write the SOB as a simple application of a non-proprietary open-source db, with source code available for geeky analysis & commentary. Compile it to run on an equally open-source OS. Pay a standard $10,500 to anyone finding and reporting a security hole.

Paper printouts should be op-scannable, and original results as written to HD and to networked system should match op-scans for each site if op-scans are fed in, in case of questions / discrepancies, and some percent of precincts should be done at random just to confirm that the sucker’s working.

This isn’t brain surgery, it’s basic run-of-the-mill, business-as-usual database design. Freaking hell!

7

It’s a few days of programming totalling a few grand, yet somehow, businesses manage to do this all the freaking time but voting machine companies cannot and charge millions of bucks for broken software.

8

Diebold built it on WinCE, and Access. You tell me, man. I vote for ‘or something’. Greed, inexperience, god knows.

9

I assure you that I’m not kidding in what I’m saying in this post. I have evidence that something is strange is going on in voting and registration in Sarasota County in Florida. About a month ago I got a postcard from the election committee for a candidate for political office. O.K., nothing strange there. Lots of people get junk in the mail with the usual “Vote for our candidate” pitch. The problem is that this postcard was for a candidate for the State House District 70 in Florida, and I live in Maryland. The postcard starts with “Thanks for exercising your privilege to vote. Now that you have received your Absentee Ballot, please fill it out and mail it back promptly. . .”

Now, interestingly, I did once live in Sarasota, Florida. That was 32 years ago when I was in college. As far as I can tell from the crummy online maps, the area where I lived was in State House District 69, just to the north of State House District 70. I don’t think I ever voted in Florida though. I presume that I voted absentee in Ohio where my family lived (and where my legal residence was). There’s no reason to suppose that my name would be on any list of one-time residents in Sarasota. I didn’t own a house, my name wasn’t even on the renter’s contract in the house that I lived in, and I didn’t have a phone in my name. Needless to say, I didn’t register to vote this year by absentee ballot in Florida.

A few days after getting this postcard, I called the Voter Fraud Hotline for the Florida State Election Board. They were baffled by this. They said that political candidates do sometimes get lists of all absentee voters and they do sometimes send out campaign literature to those voters. They checked the list of absentee voters. My name was not on their list.

If this is voter fraud, it’s the most arcane attempt at it I’ve ever heard of. They would have to fraudulently register me to vote by absentee ballot and then steal the ballot before it got to me. Furthermore, they would have to create two lists of absentee voters and make sure that when the state election people looked me up in their computers, they didn’t find my name. But if it’s merely a mistake, it’s also a weird mistake. How did my name get on the list of absentee voters that this political candidate’s committee used to send their campaign literature to? The Florida State Election Board told me that they will contact the campaign committee of this candidate and try to figure out how my name got on their list. I haven’t heard anything back from them since calling them almost a month ago.

10

Gonna resurrect this thread to add some more numbers, plus some news updates.

News update 1: Buchanan has been certified the winner by a 369-vote margin.
News update 2: Jennings has contested the result in court, on account of the Sarasota County undervotes.

Stat dump 1: Not only did the Buchanan-Jennings House race have way more undervotes in Sarasota County than the FL Sen and Governor races, but it also had way more undervotes than the Attorney General, Commissioner of Agriculture, Chief Financial Officer and Hospital Board races, more undervotes than the County Charter Amendment and six other amendments (FL Constitution? not sure), and so forth. Here’s a breakdown of undervotes in countywide races in Sarasota County, out of 142,532 ballots cast, just doing the big ones here; you can dig down into the link for the lesser races:


FL-13 House race: 18,412
FL Gov             1,830
US Senate          1,621
FL Atty Gen        6,217
Ag Comm'r          7,394
CFO                6,318
Hospital Board    14,129

I think that squelches any residual doubt that thousands of Sarasotans “just decided to exercise their right not to vote” in the most hotly contested race on the ballot.

I’ve done a precinct-by-precinct breakdown of the House race undervotes (sorry, no link - I’ll try to get it onto Google Spreadsheets or whatever the heck it is later; right now it’s an Excel file on my computer), and while the undervote rates vary widely across precincts, the undervote rates between Buchanan-leaning and Jennings-leaning precincts pretty much cancel out: if the Sarasota undervotes were apportioned between Buchanan and Jennings proportionately to their respective shares of the known votes in the county, Jennings would gain 1016 votes on Buchanan; if the undervotes in each precinct were apportioned proportionately to their respective shares of the known votes in each precinct, Jennings would gain 1010 votes.

Which is the long way of saying that where in Sarasota County the undervotes were, didn’t affect things in the least.

Which makes it even weirder that, according to an Orlando Sentinel analysis of the ballots with House undervotes, the undervotes in the House race were much more heavily Democratic in other races than the county as a whole:

Specifically, Crist beat Davis in Sarasota County by a 54-43 margin, with 3% of the vote going to minor candidates. Assuming the 3% held among the House undervotes, Davis presumably beat Crist by 52-45 among the undervotes. So the Dem gubernatorial candidate ran about 9% better among the undervotes.

In the Agrriculture Commissioner race, Bronson won by 59-41 countywide, but lost among the undervotes by about 51.5-48.5, a swing of about 10.5 points toward the Dems among this group.

The Sentinel doesn’t give the numbers among the undervotes for the Senate, Attorney General, and CFO races. But these numbers are at the very least strongly suggestive of a hack: the odds against picking 18,000 ballots more or less at random out of 142,000, and getting a sample that favored one candidate by 9% more than the population at large, are astronomical: the standard error is on the order of 0.4%.

That isn’t proof, but barring some other explanation, it’s certainly the way I’d bet.

At any rate, chances are the new House of Representatives will decide this one in one manner or another, either by seating one of the candidates, or refusing to seat either one, pending a special election.

11

How much discretion does the House have there?

12

The House has absolute discretion over its membership, and may refuse to seat or expel members at its whim.

13

But if the incoming House has a significant number of new members – and you can’t vote until you are recognized and seated – does that give the senior members veto power over admitting the new ones?

14

I… I… I don’t know.

This is the best I could find, from wikipedia about Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.:

It would appear that it was the incoming House that excluded him.

15

Recent stories from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:

Bloggers step up for Jennings

Protesters demand new election for District 13 congressional seat

Analysis points to bad ballot design

Audit to review computer code

Jennings keeping busy in capital

Jennings gets Dean’s help in bid for revote (for this and all below, registration required but free)

Election firm says codes are a secret

Sample ballot was different from screen

Blocking Buchanan could hurt Democrats

16

And from the Washington Post: Dean Seeks New Election in Fla. Race

That should get interesting!

17

The reality is that with these machines, anyone could alter the results, and then even remove evidence of what they did. There wouldn’t ever be any way to tell if the election was thrown or not.

18

More recent stories from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:

Motion to dismiss contested election lawsuit withdrawn

Touch-screen critics are concerned with Crist appointment

District 13 race to go back to court

The case for Jennings (registration required)

19

Update: A Florida judge has ruled Jennings cannot examine the programming code of the voting machines, calling that an ES&S “trade secret.” The Jennings campaign has promised to appeal.

The disputed election will be one of the first items of business when the House convenes next week.

20

Update: Jennings has appealed the court ruling described above.

Buchanan has been sworn in but Pelosi was careful to state that does not determine the final right to the seat, nor prejudice Jennings’ challenge.