Recount In Sarasota County

I's official. Sarasota County will perform a recount for the Christine Jennings-Vern Buchanan congressional race. Governor Jeb Bush has expressed concern about the undervotes.

"This is obviously something we need to look into, and very quickly," Bush said as state elections officials prepared to oversee an expected recount next week in the 13th District race between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings.

Undervotes is votes not cast in a paticular race. Say there is 1,000 people who go to the polls. 900 only voted for a city council seat. That would leave 100 undervotes in that race.

The fear is that many votes in the Jennings-Buchanan were not recorded. Former poll worker Kenneth Sanderson voted for Jenning and said his vote didn't show on the screen.

Among them was Kenneth Sanderson, who said he cast an early vote for Jennings last week that didn't show up on the review screen. He corrected it before turning in his ballot, but questioned whether the same happened to others who didn't catch the omission.

"I'm an ex-poll worker, so I understand all the problems that can happen," he said. "I don't hold much confidence in machines."

Other voters complained that their votes weren't showing up on the screen. The Miami Herald reports that there were 18,382 nonvotes in the race. The voting machine also experience technical problems.

But Rowland, other poll workers and voters say more than bad ballot design was involved. She said some people had such trouble getting the screen to register their votes that she devised other techniques for ballot casting.

''I was telling people to use their knuckles,'' she said.

She said she then turned the machines off and called technicians to check them out. When the machines were turned on again after 40 minutes, she said, the technicians gave her a frustrating explanation:

''They have to really press down hard. They're not pressing hard enough,'' she said the technician told her.

Florida's Department of State will run an official audit of Sarasota County's voting machines.

Alex Newberry has an audio report.