It seems 494,928 voter records in Florida have disappeared!

[Dr.Phool]

x-post from GD

I received this e-mail from the FDP last night. Included is a link to the Secretary of States web-site, where you can check to see whether you voted or not.

I checked last night. Both my wife and myself, who voted absentee are not listed as having voted in 2006. I ran the voter info for my Republican sister-in-law, who lives next door. She is recorded as having voted.

This morning, I talked to John Russell, whose congressional campaign I helped manage, and is currently challenging the results of the election. I ran his info through, and he didn't vote for himself either.

This state stinks to high heaven. I'll cross post to the Florida forum, where this will have a longer lifespan.

Here's the e-mail from the FDP. Oh, and by the way, we brought this up to Karen Thurman and several DEC chairs nearly 2 years ago. Have you ever talked to a wall? I guess they get it now.

The e- mail....


Dear Floridians,

Last week, Republican Governor Charlie Crist and Democratic U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler joined together to urge the Legislature to require all voting machines in Florida to have a paper trail by 2008.

This was a groundbreaking step, and we applaud the Governor and Congressman for working together across party lines to deal with this problem. But there are still some major problems to deal with from the last election.

In 2006, Florida voters were not guaranteed a paper trail, and we've already seen huge problems. Most notably in the Congressional District #13 election, 18,000 electronically-cast votes went missing in Sarasota County. Now, unfortunately, I have some new, disturbing information, and I need you to take action.

It has come to my attention that the office of the Secretary of State appears to have no record of the votes cast by almost half a million Floridians.

Yes, half a million. According to the Secretary of State's official statewide voter file, the votes of 494,928 Floridians have disappeared. Though these votes seem to have been counted in November, now they are gone.

The state doesn't even have a record of the vote cast by Governor Crist's own father. Is YOUR vote missing too?

Our dynamic online communications team has put together a website where you can enter your information to determine whether or not your vote is missing.

Please visit: www.fladems.com/missingvotes today. If your vote is missing, you need to know about it. The website will direct you on how you can help increase awareness about this problem.

While this new information is alarming, it's unfortunately not surprising for the many of us who lived through the 2000 election. I support the Crist-Wexler proposal, and I have hope that the Governor's newly appointed Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, will move quickly to implement the necessary changes. We're long over due for an election process in which we can all have faith.

Please forward this message to your friends and family in Florida so they can take action, too.

Thank you,

Congresswoman Karen Thurman
Chair, Florida Democratic Party
www.fladems.com/missingvotes

[Dr.Phool]

1. UPON FURTHER INVESTIGATION.....

From what it looks like right now, it seems that the Florida Democratic Party is using a flawed database. My associate called the Citrus County SOE and the Florida Division Of Elections about her son's missing ballot, and both confirm that he did vote in the election.

I have a doctors appointment at 2:00pm, then I'll swing by the Pasco SOE office and check some more.

My friend also called the FDP about the problems with their database, and got some bullshit story that it wasn't about challenging the election results, but trying to get a more compatible database for their software.

The FDP is showing what a bunch of incompetent fools they really are. Running around squawking like Chicken Little, when we have serious election problems that need to be addressed.

I'll have more when I return later.

[tinfoilinfor2005]

2. I just started another thread on this. Sorry, didn't realize you

had posted the site. :blush:

The records don't show either my husband or I as having voted. We voted absentee ballot, and were extremely careful to do everything correctly, including postage.

What do you mean about flawed database? I received the email from my party chairperson, so I would like to pass on to her any information that might be helpful.

[Dr.Phool]

3. We did our own investigation.

We checked with the SOE's in Pasco, Hernando, Hillsborough, and Citrus counties. All of us who checked on our "missing votes" found them recorded at both our SOE's, and with the Division of Elections in Tallahassee.

We've already talked to the person at the FDP, in charge of the database, snf they were aware they had flawed software, and a bad database to begin with.

We warned these idiots, and Karen Thurman in particular, to start doing something about paperless voting machines almost 2 years ago, and they chose to ignore us. It looks like they're trying to cover up their own incompetence, and failure to start the GOTV effort until 2 weeks before the general election- after early voting had started.

Not only that, but by releasing this e-mail, they've pretty much wiped out the credibility of us who've worked for several years to get voting transparency, and paper ballot in Florida.

They released this e-mail last night.

Dear Democratic Leader,

By now you have probably heard about, if not used, the Florida Democratic Party's "Is Your Vote Missing?" service on our website. In short, interested parties can input a few pieces of information into an online form. This information is electronically checked against the file from the Secretary of State (SOS). Users are then told that their vote is either recorded properly or missing from the SOS file. We designed this tool as a mechanism to raise awareness about the problems we're dealing with in the SOS voter file.

The major problem with the SOS file, which was delivered to the state legislature (as the SOS is statutorily obligated to do within 75 days of the general election), is that when totaling the voters who cast ballots according to the file, we calculate the number of voters who turned out to be 494,928 fewer than the Official Results posted on the Secretary of State website.

The root of this problem appears to lie in the SOS's coding of voters at the state level - not the county level. Each Florida voter is supposed to receive one of six codes, such A for voted absentee, N for did not vote, or E for voted early. However, 2,662,861 voters were erroneously coded with an X. A designation for this code does not appear in any official document that we could obtain, and the SOS's office could not offer us a reasonable explanation for what it means. We believe that the 494,928 missing voters are among the 2,662,861 X-coded
voters, but there is no way to tell based on the SOS file.

Disturbingly, the 494,928 missing voters represent more than 10% of the voters that, according to the SOS website, cast ballots - a significant error. While this error may not be indicated on the local Supervisor of Election (SOE) file, it is in the official SOS file released to the state legislative leaders. In essence, the SOS office messed up the data of the local SOEs - and this happened statewide, with every county's data.

While I am sure that local SOEs are anxious to protect their images, they need to understand that:

1. FDP has not implicated nor accused any local SOEs of any mistakes related to this issue. This, to our knowledge, is purely an SOS problem.

2. The image of local SOEs is better maintained when the state isn't altering their data. If the SOE has a problem with the data, they need to bring it up with the SOS, not the FDP, which is simply reporting the error.

As you're aware, in order for us to do our jobs, we need good data. We don't have Republican sums of money rolling in the door allowing us to blanket voters. We have to utilize data to run smarter, more targeted operations, and we need good data to do this. That's how we elected our new members of Congress, Ron Klein and Tim Mahoney, and it's how we will ensure they are reelected in 2008. Pressuring the SOS - not your local SOE - to do its job and maintain an accurate file is our mission here.

We will continue to apply pressure to the SOS. Responses from you and your local officials, including SOEs, indicate that you are applying pressure as well.

Since we brought this problem to the attention of the SOS's office several weeks ago, there has been no respectable response. Additionally, our Communications Director has informed me that several reporters have attempted to contact the SOS - to no avail.

If you have any questions or require any further information, please feel free to get in touch with me. Until we get this problem fixed, we will be continuing to fight. I hope you will, too.

Best wishes,

Dirk Wiggins, Voter File Director
Florida Democratic Party
[e-mail]
[phone]