Intellectual Property Law

The Government Accountability Office is expected to release a final report on Friday covering its investigation into the controversial 13th Congressional District race in Sarasota, Florida, in 2006.

The report concludes that while investigators can't provide "absolute assurance" that the voting machines didn't play a role in the excessive number of undervotes that appeared in that race, the GAO's testing "significantly reduced the possibility" that the machines were responsible.

The report says the cause was more likely a combination of voters choosing not to vote in that race and a bad ballot design that caused other voters to miss the race, which appeared at the top of the screen.

The CD-13 race has been in dispute for more than a year after ballots cast on touch-screen voting machines in Sarasota County showed no vote cast in that race on more than 18,000 ballots.

Republican representative Vern Buchanan won the election by fewer than 400 votes and was sworn into office last year, despite a challenge from Democrat Christine Jennings. Jennings and voter groups filed lawsuits to force an investigation after hundreds of voters reported having problems with the machines, which are made by Election Systems & Software.

Some voters complained that they had to touch the screen several times before the machine registered their vote. Other said the machine initially registered their vote in that race, but when they reached the review screen at the end of the ballot it showed no vote selected in the race.

A couple of months after the election a memo from the voting machine company to Florida election officials surfaced and seemed to add credence to the voters complaints.

The memo discussed a known problem with the machines that caused them to respond slowly to voters' touch. An ES&S employee wrote in the memo that voters would need to apply more pressure for several seconds before the machines would register their touch and recommended that election officials post a sign in polling places to this effect. However, Sarasota's election head, Kathy Dent, opted not to post the sign or tell voters about the problem. Instead she denied problems with the machines, even after voters complained about them on election day.

An episode of Dan Rather Reports that aired last year also revealed that 30% to 40% of touch-screens that were sent to a factory in the Philippines to be connected to ES&S voting machines were found to have cosmetic and electronic problems and that a Florida county returned more than 1,000 ES&S touchscreens in 2003 for calibration problems that were not unlike some of the problems that voters in Sarasota experienced in 2006.

The GAO was tasked by a special House task force with looking into the race to determine if the machines might have played a role in the outcome. Late last year, the GAO concluded that initial tests that Florida had conducted on the machines after the election were inadequate and laid out plans for additional tests. The report to be released Friday is the result of those tests.

Jennings never conceded the 2006 race and will be challenging Buchanan for the CD-13 seat again this November.

Sarasota County is no longer using the ES&S machines involved in the disputed race. The county voted to switch to paper ballots and has switched to an optical-scan system made by Diebold Election Systems. The county had initially planned to use an optical-scan system made by ES&S but a county commissioner told a reporter, "I've lost faith in ES&S entirely."

Photo: Warren Ruda/The Citizens' Voice

See also:

• Report: Magnet and PDA Sufficient to Change Votes on ES&S Voting Machines
• Docs Point to E-Voting Bug in Contested Race
• E-Vote Memo Is a 'Smoking Gun'
• Dan Rather Investigates Voting Machines -- Uncovers New Surprises about ES&S Touch-Screens
• Academics Call Foul on Florida Test of Voting Machines