CQ TODAY PRINT EDITION
Feb. 25, 2008 – 7:36 p.m.
House Dismisses Challenge to Outcome of Florida Race
By Molly Hooper, CQ Staff
The House on Monday dismissed a challenge filed by candidate Christine Jennings and affirmed that Republican Vern Buchanan was the rightful winner in the 2006 election.
By voice vote, the House adopted a resolution (
Buchanan had been certified the winner, by 369 votes, of the Sarasota-based 13th Congressional District seat.
More than 18,000 ballots were recorded as having no choice made in that race. Jennings said she was certain that machine glitches were responsible for at least some of those thousands of no-vote ballots.
After an automatic machine recount and a manual recount, a state-run audit found no evidence that the machines had contributed to an inaccurate vote count. Subsequently, congressional auditors concluded that the machines appeared to have functioned properly.
For Buchanan, Monday’s action declares his seating to have been legitimate — one year and nine weeks after he took the oath of office.
Although he was allowed to take his seat with the rest of the 110th Congress, a task force was formed in early 2007 to investigate Jennings’ challenge, and the Government Accountability Office was called in to examine Sarasota’s machines.
When the probe was unable to demonstrate machine error, the task force and the full House Administration Committee recommended that Jennings’ challenge be dismissed.
Jennings is running against Buchanan again this year.
Comments
The task force should have taken a look at the 110% that voted in Broward precinct D001 in the recent Presidential preference primary and was certified by the Secretary of State.
"Congressional auditors concluded that the machines appeared to have functioned properly." - The voting machines in Florida 13th congressional district made one error 18,000 times to the detriment of one candidate, Jennings. That's not "machine malfunction," its called programming. Machine error was not the issue here. The issue was election fraud. The excellent study that served as a basis for the election contest showed that Sarasota County had 9 times the "under votes" (no vote cast) as the balance of the district with a near equal population. A study by Charles Steward III of MIT, a proponent of electronic voting, estimated that 14,000 of the 18,000 under votes in Sarasota County were clearly ballots that would have been cast for Jennings. You didn't have 9 times the ballot errors or 9 times the voting machine malfunction in Sarasota, you had a stolen election. The failure of this committee to look at all options and its blindness to the obvious is a great disservice to everyone.
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