Yesterday, Florida’s Division of Elections began its audit of the election results in Florida’s Sarasota County. The results? “Intriguing,” according to Democrat Christine Jennings’ lawyer Kendall Coffey.
All day yesterday, election workers sat in glass booths and voted accorded to a predetermined script designed to mimic the voting on Election Day. The entire process was videotaped and monitored by the campaigns and the press.
The tests, performed on backup machines, didn’t really turn out the way anyone expected. “Of the 251 ballots cast” in the audit, “five additional votes were counted for Jennings, including three extra votes in one precinct,” according to The Herald Tribune.
Jennings has contested the official election results, of course, because the electronic machines didn’t register votes in the congressional race for more than 18,000 Sarasota County voters, about fifteen percent, an abnormally high rate. But yesterday’s results didn’t register an unexpectedly high “undervote” rate. Instead, the tests seemed to give a few extra votes to Jennings.
But an incorrect result is an incorrect result, and so Coffey, who has denounced the audit for being insufficiently rigorous, said in a prepared statement that “the discrepancies are intriguing.”
The spokesperson for the Division of Elections, meanwhile, was quick to attribute the discrepancies to “human error.” Today, the audit team will doublecheck their math and monitor the video of yesterday’s mock election to see if that’s the case.
On Friday, the second round of the audit will involve similar tests on machines actually used on Election Day.
