Paul Kiel December 5, 2006, 3:11 PM

More fun down in Florida, where Democrat Christine Jennings is challenging the official tally that shows she lost by fewer than 400 votes to Republican Vern Buchanan.

First, a little inappropriate commentary from the officials: in today’s Sarasota Herald Tribune, David Drury, who’s overseeing the audit, opined on its probable outcome:

… [Drury] said he expects “nothing” to be revealed from [the audit’s examination of voting machines’ source code]. “They’re not going to find anything. It is my belief, and I rarely like to speculate but it is based upon the parallel testing, that there will be nothing found in the source code that will explain the undervote.”

Hey, it’s Florida! What do you expect from the election officials down there?

A little better than what we’re getting, apparently. As People for the American Way protested in a statement reacting to Drury’s remarks, one doesn’t want “the guy in charge of the audit announcing his predictions about the outcome before the investigation of software code even begins.”

Second, an analysis of Election Day data by the Herald Tribune has led the paper to declare that they know the primary reason that more than 18,000 Sarasota County voters failed to register a vote in the race: ballot design.

The reason they think that? Take a look at the ballot:

Most races got their own page. But the House race was squeezed on the same page as the gubernatorial race. Straight-ticket voters, expecting to vote for one Republican or one Democrat per page, were more likely to mark a candidate in the gubernatorial race and miss the House race entirely.

As it happens, there are many more straight-ticket Democrats than Republicans in the county, according to the paper’s analysis, and they’ve been called “largely responsible for the massive undervote in Sarasota’s House District 13 race.”

Folks involved in the FL-13 dispute have talked about the ballot design problem from the beginning. But you haven’t heard a lot from the Jennings camp about that because 1) there is ample evidence that simple machine malfunction is also a culprit, and 2), as the Herald Tribune points out, ballot design is “a legal dead end for Jennings.” Getting a judge to order a new election because voters happened to overlook the race is just harder.

According to the paper, their “experts theorized that straight ticket voters would be more vulnerable to a ballot design flaw because they are looking for three letters — ‘DEM’ or ‘REP’ — instead of carefully scanning the ballot for a particular candidate.” To buffer that contention, the paper points to an attorney general race in two other counties with a similar ballot that also had a high undervote rate, again among straight ticket voters.

Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent has admitted that the design was a problem and says they won’t make the same mistake again.

Of course, even if ballot design was the main culprit, Jennings could still convince a judge that machine malfunction had enough of an effect on the race to warrant a redo.

Election 2006