Update on missing 18,000 votes in Florida

Here's a link to the Sarasota Herald Tribune. The recount has been front-page news there, of course, since the election. Buchanan, the Republican, is calling on Jennings, the Democrat, to concede, even though the recount is ongoing, and even though there are calls for a revote. I love democracy.

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061117/NEWS/611170811

Apparently, they just can't help themselves.

From the Orlando Sentinel today:

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/state/orl-mvote2206nov22,0,1913349.story?coll=orl-news-headlines-state

The group of nearly 18,000 voters that registered no choice in Sarasota's disputed congressional election solidly backed Democratic candidates in all five of Florida's statewide races, an Orlando Sentinel analysis of ballot data shows.

Among these voters, even the weakest Democrat -- agriculture-commissioner candidate Eric Copeland -- outpaced a much-better-known Republican incumbent by 551 votes.

The trend, which continues up the ticket to the race for governor and U.S. Senate, suggests that if votes were truly cast and lost -- as Democrat Christine Jennings maintains -- they were votes that likely cost her the congressional election.

Republican Vern Buchanan's 369-vote victory was certified by state officials Monday. His camp says that, although people may have skipped the race -- intentionally or not -- there is no evidence that votes went missing.

But the results of the Sentinel analysis, two experts said, warrant additional investigation.

"Wow," University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato said. "That's very suggestive -- I'd even say strongly suggestive -- that if there had been votes recorded, she [Jennings] would have won that House seat."

David Dill, an electronic-voting expert at Stanford University, put it this way: "It seems to establish with certainty that more Democrats are represented in those undervoted ballots." [...]

The results showed that the undervoted ballots skewed Democratic in all of those races, even in the three races in which the county as a whole went Republican [...]

Since Election Day, dozens -- if not hundreds -- of voters have reported problems at the polls. Some say their vote for Jennings never registered after they touched her name. Others say they never saw the congressional race on the machine's screen.

This is my favorite line from the article:

Buchanan's camp says that undervotes may simply be voters exercising their choice not to make a selection in a race.

Uh huh.