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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (754323)	11/14/2006 10:00:02 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

"tossed it whole onto the fire... that was the first BBQ..." Pig Roast.... Ummmmmmmmmm! (Take the chitlins out first though... we ain't into steamed, uncleaned intestines!)

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (754323)	11/14/2006 10:09:57 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Congress race goes to court Early edition: “Alarming aberrations” in machines are claimed as a recount of ballots begins. TAMARA LUSH and JONI JAMES Published November 13, 2006 sptimes.com SARASOTA — As congressional hopeful Christine Jennings went to Capitol Hill on Monday for freshman orientation, her attorneys went to court over what they say are “alarming aberrations” in Sarasota County’s vote tallies. In a lawsuit filed in state court in Sarasota County, Jennings’ lawyers asked a judge to secure the voting machines as evidence until outside experts can go in and figure out what happened. “We’re not saying anything is being done improperly,” said lawyer Bill Partridge. “It’s important to preserve the evidence.” Officials today will continue a detailed recounting of votes in the 13th Congressional District race — the second-closest congressional contest in the nation last week — amid allegations of voting machine malfunctions. Republican Vern Buchanan led Democrat Jennings by just 377 votes after the Nov. 7 election. In Sarasota County, touch screen voting machines recorded that 18,382 voters, or 13 percent of all voters, did not vote for either candidate — a rate much higher than in other counties in the district. No one is sure why there were so many undervotes. Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent says voters could have intentionally skipped that race because it was particularly nasty, with lots of negative ads and campaigning. But some skeptics blame voting machine malfunctions, poor ballot design or skewed computer coding in the machines. As part of the recount Monday, Sarasota officials ran about 22,000 optical scan absentee ballots through machines to find ballots where people marked either no candidate or more than one candidate. The recount team also is downloading individual vote tallies from 1,498 electronic voting machines, a process that takes several minutes per machine. At the end of the day, officials had collected tallies from about half of the machines. Final vote tallies must be certified by Saturday. If the county misses any recount deadline, the tally goes back to election night totals. “It’s just a long, tedious process,” Dent said. The machine recount was ordered by the state’s election canvassing commission, which met Monday morning. The commission — made up of Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher, Gov. Jeb Bush and state Sen. Dan Webster of Winter Garden, all Republicans — also authorized a manual recount of undervotes and overvotes starting Thursday if the machine recount shows a margin of 0.25 percent or less. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Sue Cobb has launched an audit of Sarasota County’s election results — separate from the state’s official recount for District 13 — that will begin in earnest Wednesday. That’s when the state Division of Elections stages a simulated election with four machines that were programmed for last week’s election by Sarasota officials but were not used. From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., eight state employees, with video cameras capturing their every move, will operate the machines and cast faux ballots to see if they can discern any problems with the machines’ performance, Cobb said. Should those results not shed any light on the county’s anomaly, Florida State University computer science professor Alec Yasinsac has been retained to examine the actual voting machines’ software after the official election results are certified, Cobb told reporters Monday. That work can’t begin earlier because the actual machines used on Election Day can’t be tampered with until the election is certified. But Cobb acknowledged it could be weeks before officials have an explanation for the 18,000 undervotes in Sarasota. In the meantime, she said, the canvassing commission has no authority under state law to delay certifying the election results while the audit is underway. “The canvassing commission is ministerial,” she said. “It does not look behind the face of the numbers.” The Associated Press and Times staff writer Anita Kumar contributed to this report. Tamara Lush can be reached at (727) 893-8612 or lush@sptimes.com. © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times