The election battle continues in Florida’s 13th District this week, as the state begins its audit of electronic voting machines. At issue is why Sarasota County’s electronic voting machines failed to register a vote in Florida’s 13th District congressional race for more than 18,000 voters, an “undervote” rate far higher than the 13th’s other counties. Analyses of those undervotes show that they cost Jennings (who lost the official tally to Republican Vern Buchanan by fewer than 400 votes) the race.
But that audit, conducted by the state’s Division of Elections, has drawn criticism for a number of reasons. As we noted last week, the state’s lead computer expert is a die-hard Republican. The conditions of the audit have also drawn fire from Democrat Christine Jennings camp.
Speaking earlier today, Jennings lawyer Kendall Coffey pointed to what he saw as key deficiencies in the audit, which might undermine Jennings’ efforts to contest the election results. Jennings’ lawsuit is on hold until the state completes its audit this Friday.
Above all, Coffey said that the state’s process went against “the basic notion of an audit that it’s supposed to be independent.” Instead, “the same state agency that is responsible for the reliability of voting systems and software are now conducting an audit to find out where that agency created problems.”
Additionally, state workers will conduct the audit by attempting to vote on a handful of machines to see if any problems arise. They will examine specific machines’ hardware and software only if they malfunction.
Coffey argued that without probing the possible causes of Election Day’s undervote — opening up the machines, examining their source code — the investigation will be inadequate. (The audit will not investigate the basic source code of the machines The manufacturer, ES&S, considers it to be a trade secret.) Coffey said that Jennings would seek access to that code for their own audit.
Coffey complained that only four out of Sarasota County’s several hundred voting machines will be used in each phase of the audit’s two phases, “only a fraction of the sampling that youâd normally want.” Coffey said at least twenty machines should be examined.
The audit will feature two day-long test runs of the machines. The first one begins tomorrow, but won’t use machines actually used in the election — those machines are off limits until the election contest period ends this Thursday. So tomorrow’s tests will be on backup machines, results which the Jennings camp regard as essentially meaningless. This Friday’s tests, by contrast, will be on machines “from the election that had the highest undervote counts,” according to The Herald-Tribune.
If the state’s audit does not turn up any problems, then Jennings’ side would certainly seek to do its own audit of the machines. But in order for that to happen, the state judge overseeing their contest of the results would have to allow it, and it’s unclear that he would.
Of course, lurking in the background to all this is that Jennings has until December 20th to contest the results in the House of Representatives, which has ultimate jurisdiction over the dispute. That move could take the fight out of the court’s hands altogether. Coffey, however, said that Jennings hasn’t “reached that stage of deliberation yet.”
