http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061115/VIDEO/61115029Supervisor of Elections in Sarasota County said there was nothing wrong with the machines which recorded no votes. Trouble is, there is no way to prove her wrong, according to computers experts, like Avi Rubin. Bottom line, the Democratic candidate is screwed again by the incompetence of an election supervisor.
http://avi-rubin.blogspot.com/What the vendors are doing is printing out the questionable results and then counting them. Of course they are going to match what was on the machine, but they do not provide an independent count. The so-called recounts of DREs are really just print and count, not RE-count. It is a waste of time.
Now, we hear that in Sarasota County, there were 18,000 undervotes in the race for the 13th congressional seat. The race is expected to be decided by fewer than 400 votes.
If paper ballots had been used, the huge number of undervotes could be investigated. Without them, there is no recourse - no way to figure out why this happened. I have several theories. Perhaps that many people just did not care about that race. Unlikely in my opinion. Most likely is that the human interface, that is, candidate placement on the ballot caused many people to miss that race. The next possibility is that a software glitch caused votes in that race not to be counted. Finally, it is possible that someone actually did something to cause this.
The problem with paperless voting is that we'll never know, and there will never be any way to find out.