Message to District 13 Voters: It's Your Fault

Elections Systems & Software, the company that made Sarasota County's voting machines, issued a press statement saying:

"ES&S was not present during the election, so it would be inappropriate to speculate on the situation," spokeswoman Jill Freidman-Wilson said. "However, we have been in contact with the Supervisor of Elections who has emphasized that the voting equipment functioned well.

"The touch screen system used in Sarasota County provides unlimited opportunity for a voter to make and change selections before a ballot is cast. Therefore, according to the Supervisor of Elections, undervotes were a result of an intentional choice not to make a selection in the congressional race or unintentional omission of a selection."

My head is spinning from the spinning. If ES&S wasn't present (Sarasota County uses their own programmers), how would they know that 18,382 people intended not to vote in the Christine Jennings-Vern Buchanan race? The Orlando Sentinel did an audit and found that 4 counties also had problems with ES&S machines.

But an Orlando Sentinel review of results among the 24 other counties that use the same electronic-voting machines as Sarasota found three other instances -- in Sumter, Lee and Charlotte counties -- where an even higher percentage of ballots failed to show any vote cast in the race for state attorney general.

In Sumter, ballots with no recorded votes -- known as "undervotes" -- accounted for 22 percent of all ballots in the attorney general's race. In Lee, 18 percent of ballots in that race were unvoted, and in Charlotte, 21 percent were blank.

By comparison, undervotes in those same counties in the U.S. Senate race were no higher than 1.5 percent.

The attorney-general undervotes in Sumter, Lee and Charlotte, representing about 45,000 blank ballots, presumably would not have affected the outcome of that race, in which Republican Bill McCollum defeated Democrat Walter "Skip" Campbell. McCollum won handily in all three counties.

In Sarasota, however, the story was much different in the race for House District 13.

What reassuring words does Florida's government have for voters?

The state considers undervotes to be a "voter's prerogative," not a problem with the system, said Jenny Nash, from Florida's Department of State.

Well, that settles that.