Just because the Republicans didn't succeed in vote-stealing their way to continued control of Congress doesn't mean that they didn't try

One thing we haven't heard a lot about in the wake of the midterm elections is voting-machine chicanery. I don't know about you, but my own suspicion is that this isn't because the Republican vote-stealing operation was any less engaged than in the last few national elections. In fact, I have no reason to doubt that it was far more energized. I'm inclined to suspect, rather, that in prime vote-stealing country what happened was that the actual Democratic margin of victory was several points higher than counted, enough to offset the now-standard GOP margin of theft.

I was prompted to think of the subject again by this column by E. J. Dionne Jr. in today's Washington Post. As it happens I was in Florida at the time of the Great Sarasota Voting-Machine Debacle--in the vote to choose a replacement for (the surely irreplaceable) Katherine Harris in the House of Representatives--and was struck by the resigned tone of the local coverage. For example, the Miami Herald, hardly a left-wing muckraking sheet, clearly understood the underlying message as "Oops, here we go again--can't we do any election right in Florida?"

For the record, while I was still in Florida, and the story of the Sarasota "undervote" was taking shape, Gov. Jeb Bush went way out on a limb and pronounced the undervote "unusual." I haven't tracked the governor's subsequent pronouncements and actions, but judging by the Florida election authorities' subsequent lack of concern for irregularities that most of us would describe as not just unusual but downright fishy, I think it's safe to say that our Jeb didn't let this unusualness unduly disrupt his routines.


An Electronic Canary

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, November 24, 2006

Americans can be grateful that Sarasota County is in Florida and not in Montana or Virginia.

There's nothing wrong with Sarasota, a lovely place. But if the voting snafus in the contest for Florida's 13th District had hung up either of this year's two closest Senate races, we still would not know which party had won control of the Senate.

Supporters of new voting technologies have been patting themselves on the back, saying there were no big voting problems this year. Let them go to Sarasota.

Here's the story so far: The official vote count in the battle for -- you won't believe this -- Katherine Harris's seat put Republican Vern Buchanan [left] 369 votes ahead of Democrat Christine Jennings [right] out of roughly 238,000 votes cast.

But in Sarasota County, there was an "undervote" of more than 18,000--meaning that those voters supposedly didn't choose to record votes in the Buchanan-Jennings race. Jennings carried the county 53 percent to 47 percent.

The Sarasota undervote in the congressional race amounted to nearly 15 percent. Kendall Coffey [right], Jennings's lawyer, has pointed out that in the other four counties in the district, the undervote ranged from 2.2 to 5.3 percent. Put another way, roughly 18,000 of the 21,000 undervotes in the contest came from Sarasota County.

It's hard to believe that Sarasota's voters had a different view of the race than voters everywhere else in the district, considering that the undervote on the county's absentee ballots, cast on paper, was only 2.5 percent. The upshot: Any reasonable statistical analysis suggests that only 3,000 to 5,000 of Sarasota's undervotes were intentional, meaning that 13,000 to 15,000 votes were probably not counted.

If you believe that these machines operated properly, then you must also believe that I missed my true vocation as an NBA center.

Imagine if 18,000 votes had just disappeared in either of the key Senate races. Or imagine a presidential election in which the electoral votes of Florida were decisive and the state was hanging in the balance by--to pick a number that comes to mind--537 votes. And, by the way, in 2000 we could at least see those hanging and dimpled chads. In this case the votes have--poof!--simply disappeared.

Despite the Sarasota problem, the state Elections Canvassing Commission certified Buchanan's "victory." Jennings has gone to court to demand a new election.

But there is good news here: This is a problem in just one congressional district. Control of the House does not depend on how this race turns out. It is therefore in the interest of both parties, not to mention the country, to be simultaneously aggressive and judicious in figuring out what went wrong in Sarasota and to use that knowledge to fix the nation's voting system before a major disaster strikes. Sarasota is the canary in the electronic coal mine.

On Tuesday, Judge William L. Gary decided not to move the case along quite as fast as Jennings had requested. That will prove to be an excellent decision if the delay is part of an effort to collect every bit of information we can on Sarasota's machines.

Jennings's lawyers have asked the judge to give her campaign full access to at least eight of the voting machines and their software--a fair request. If the taxpayer-supported companies that sell this equipment are not willing to be 100 percent open about how their machines and their programming work, they should not be allowed to record and count the people's votes.

And if anyone still needs evidence that all electronic systems should provide verifiable paper trails so real ballots are available in the event of a recount, let them go to Sarasota.

If the courts punt, Congress, which has a right to judge the credentials of its members, should get to the bottom of this. It may be asking the impossible, but Democrats and Republicans should not make this a fight about which party picks up one more seat. Instead, they should conduct a joint inquest into this contest to provide a basis for bipartisan legislation creating national standards for improving our voting systems.

The U.S. Supreme Court has insisted that "[h]aving once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person's vote over that of another." Thousands of voters in the 13th District have an interest in demanding that the system live up to those words, which came from the decision in a little case in 2000 called Bush v. Gore.


FRIDAY NIGHT UPDATE--Great Minds Think Alike Dept.:
Krugman's back from vacation and thinking about Sarasota too!

You know the story about the columnist who cried vacation, right? How he was always crying "Vacation!" and as a result when the wolf came everyone figured he was on vacation and didn't pay any attention to him and so there was huffing and, you know, puffing and . . . stuff. Well, who thought Paul Krugman would sneak back into town on a Friday?

Okay, I confess, I worked myself down as close as I could manage to a vegetative state for the start of the four-day weekend. Yesterday afternoon I did slog downstairs to pick up the newspaper; today I didn't even manage that until I finally ventured out this evening. Amazingly, my paper was still there. (If I don't fetch it before then, I figure I deserve to have it stolen.) And there, to my surprise, was Krugman weighing in on the electronic voting mess, with specific reference to that "undervote" in Florida's 13th CD which Governor Bush himself pronounced "unusual."

Naturally Krugman says what needs to be said the way it needs to be said. So instead of burying the column in a comment, let's just let the thing roll:

November 24, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

When Votes Disappear
By PAUL KRUGMAN

You know what really had me terrified on Nov. 7? The all-too-real possibility of a highly suspect result. What would we have done if the Republicans had held on to the House by a narrow margin, but circumstantial evidence strongly suggested that a combination of vote suppression and defective--or rigged--electronic voting machines made the difference?

Fortunately, it wasn't a close election. But the fact that our electoral system worked well enough to register an overwhelming Democratic landslide doesn't mean that things are OK. There were many problems with voting in this election--and in at least one Congressional race, the evidence strongly suggests that paperless voting machines failed to count thousands of votes, and that the disappearance of these votes delivered the race to the wrong candidate.

Here's the background: Florida's 13th Congressional District is currently represented by Katherine Harris, who as Florida's secretary of state during the 2000 recount famously acted as a partisan Republican rather than a fair referee. This year Ms. Harris didn't run for re-election, making an unsuccessful bid for the Senate instead. But according to the official vote count, the Republicans held on to her seat, with Vern Buchanan, the G.O.P. candidate, narrowly defeating Christine Jennings, the Democrat.

The problem is that the official vote count isn't credible. In much of the 13th District, the voting pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County, which used touch-screen voting machines made by Election Systems and Software, almost 18,000 voters--nearly 15 percent of those who cast ballots using the machines--supposedly failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly contested Congressional race. That compares with undervote rates ranging from 2.2 to 5.3 percent in neighboring counties.

Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, which interviewed hundreds of voters who called the paper to report problems at the polls, strongly suggests that the huge apparent undervote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software.

About a third of those interviewed by the paper reported that they couldn't even find the Congressional race on the screen. This could conceivably have been the result of bad ballot design, but many of them insisted that they looked hard for the race. Moreover, more than 60 percent of those interviewed by The Herald-Tribune reported that they did cast a vote in the Congressional race--but that this vote didn't show up on the ballot summary page they were shown at the end of the voting process.

If there were bugs in the software, the odds are that they threw the election to the wrong candidate. An Orlando Sentinel examination of other votes cast by those who supposedly failed to cast a vote in the Congressional race shows that they strongly favored Democrats, and Mr. Buchanan won the official count by only 369 votes. The fact that Mr. Buchanan won a recount--that is, a recount of the votes the machines happened to record--means nothing.

Although state officials have certified Mr. Buchanan as the victor, they've promised an audit of the voting machines. But don't get your hopes up: as in 2000, state election officials aren't even trying to look impartial. To oversee the audit, the state has chosen as its "independent" expert Prof. Alec Yasinsac of Florida State University--a Republican partisan who made an appearance on the steps of the Florida Supreme Court during the 2000 recount battle wearing a "Bush Won" sign.

Ms. Jennings has now filed suit with the same court, demanding a new election. She deserves one.

But for the nation as a whole, the important thing isn't who gets seated to represent Florida's 13th District. It's whether the voting disaster there leads to legislation requiring voter verification and a paper trail.

And I have to say that the omens aren't good. I've been shocked at how little national attention the mess in Sarasota has received. Here we have as clear a demonstration as we're ever likely to see that warnings from computer scientists about the dangers of paperless electronic voting are valid--and most Americans probably haven't even heard about it.

As far as I can tell, the reason Florida-13 hasn't become a major national story is that neither control of Congress nor control of the White House is on the line. But do we have to wait for a constitutional crisis to realize that we're in danger of becoming a digital-age banana republic?