Oh sure, blame it on the voters again1 . The NYT photographs of the ballot don’t make the same point, in fact, the ballot looks fairly straightforward.
Panel Cites Voter Error, Not Software, in Loss of Votes
Florida officials suggested that as many as 18,000 votes were lost in a disputed Congressional race due to voter confusion rather than malfunctioning software.
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While some voters in Sarasota bristled yesterday at the idea that they had done anything wrong in casting their votes, or that nearly 13 percent of all voters could have failed to spot the race on the ballot, members of the investigative team said that those remained the only plausible theories.The report acknowledged that the huge undervote — in which voters cast a ballot in other races but not for the Congressional seat — was both “abnormal and unexpected.
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Clare Ward-Jenkins, a Sarasota resident who had trouble registering her vote, said she felt insulted by the report’s implication that ”we’re too stupid to know how to vote.“Ms. Ward-Jenkins and more than 100 other voters contacted The Sarasota Herald-Tribune shortly after the election to complain that even though an ”X“ appeared on the touchscreen when they pressed the box for Ms. Jennings, their votes had disappeared by the time they got to a final screen for reviewing their choices. Ms. Ward-Jenkins and most of the others said they had to go through the process at least one more time to make their votes stick, raising concerns in the Jennings camp that other voters might have failed to notice similar problems that voided their ballots.
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But other voting experts said that because the machines used in the election have been sequestered by a court, only a portion of them have been examined closely.The software experts said they also found several security vulnerabilities in the programming for the voting machines, made by Election Systems and Software in Omaha
I expect all problems to be ignored, and expect most news reports to focus on the view of ‘experts’ who support the election board, ignoring the minor yet nagging indications of fraud.
Footnotes:- actually a repost from 2007. Am curious as to the 2008 election. Perhaps since the Karl Rove conservatives aren’t really vested in John McCain, they won’t even bother trying to swing the current election, and will just keep their powder dry for a future election [↩]