Nov. 22, 2006 | The recount is over in the 13th Congressional District in Florida. The lawyers have won -- and the Democrat has lost. As in the presidential election of 2000, that loss appears to have been caused by a glitch in the voting process. But this time, the controversy centers on the very electronic voting machines many counties around the country purchased after the 2000 election in hopes of avoiding the sort of debacle that produced Bush v. Gore.
On Monday, Florida election officials named Republican Vern Buchanan the victor in the race for the House seat that Katherine Harris -- the Katherine Harris who was Florida's secretary of state during the 2000 recount -- vacated to run for the Senate. The Florida Elections Canvassing Commission, which is made up of Gov. Jeb Bush and two other elected Republican officials, said that the results of the recount showed Buchanan had beaten Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes in a race where nearly 240,000 votes were cast. The commission awarded the victory to Buchanan despite the fact that the mystery of more than 18,000 missing votes has not been resolved.
Neither candidate in the race is backing down. On Monday, after the Elections Canvassing Commission announced its decision, Democrat Christine Jennings filed suit in state court. Jennings' suit asked the judge to declare her the winner or hold a new election, and charged that there was "pervasive malfunctioning" of the touch-screen voting machines in the race.
That afternoon, Buchanan held a press conference calling on Jennings to concede: "The people have spoken, and I have won this election," Buchanan said. "I won on election night, I won in the machine recount, and I won in the manual recount." Jennings responded with her own press conference, where she declared, "The voters of Sarasota and the entire country deserve answers about what went wrong with this voting system ... Our next representative to the U.S. Congress should be chosen by the will of the people, and not by a problem in the voting machine." On Tuesday, voting rights groups filed their own lawsuit demanding a new election.
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