In the 13th Congressional District in Florida, in Sarasota, the touchscreen machines may have malfunctioned, failing to register votes for the Democratic candidate, Christine Jennings, and producing an extraordinary undervote for that race.   Abby Goodnough, "In Florida, Echoes of 2000 as Vote Questions Emerge," New York Times (Nov. 10, 2006).  There is more than sufficient reason to look into this.  Voters reported problems with the Jennings vote:  that it did not appear in the review screen, and that they were required to backtrack and revote the race.  So some voters, who did not check the confirmed votes carefully, may have been unaware that their initial vote did not “take.”  And the undervote numbers are exceptional and not easily explained.  So there is a legitimate question here, very much in need of careful review.

     For now, the question is:  how will Florida address the question, so that it is answered to the satisfaction of voters?  [Note: the firm associated with this site represents Democratic Party organizations actively supporting Ms. Jennings].  At a time when jurisdictions throughout the country hope to build public confidence in electronic voting systems, this is a question of national importance.  Even defenders of the machines understand that they may malfunction; and so a challenge for election officials—and for the judicial process, on review—is to show that if questions of this kind are raised, they can be thoroughly and responsibly examined.  In this instance, the solution might be expensive—from election and other state officials’ perspective, more expensive, burdensome and frustrating than they can bear to even think about.  Supporters of Jennings’ opponent may feel the same way, for both the same reasons and some quite different ones.  Understandable, but also irrelevant:  if the machines operated to disenfranchise thousands of voters, with demonstrable effect on the vote in a close race, then the state is obligated to offer the full measure of redress.

      So Florida is once again faced with the hard choice of how to present itself in an election controversy.  There are some discouraging straws in this political wind.  It has been suggested that voters may have boycotted the race in some form of quiet popular protest of negative campaigning.  This is a talking point, not an argument, and it is not serious.  No evidence supports the conclusion that voters in Sarasota were more up in arms about negative campaigning than in other parts of the District—or in other parts of the country.  By its nature, this claim evades testing; which is no doubt its appeal to those making it.

     The outcome here matters a great deal, but so does the way that it is reached.  Voter acceptance of the machinery depends on visible improvements in machine performance, maintenance, and testing, but no less so on openness and professionalism in dealing with breakdown.  Major breakdown in machine performance would be bad enough, and one would hope that it is rare.  It is breakdown in election administration—caused by partisanship, negligence, incompetence, self-protectiveness, or all of these—that may doom voter trust. 

Bob Bauer