|

Something has gone very wrong when Americans
report being ashamed to tell relatives living in what
were once considered “banana republics” in South
America about the Sarasota election.
"I
want to get to the bottom of this," voter Linda
Crespo, a native of Brazil, told the Sarasota
Herald-Tribune.
"We
were in Brazil in September when their
election was going on and we left because of all the
nastiness in that campaign. Then we come back to this.
I tell you, it made me ashamed to tell my family and
friends in South America about what is going on
here."
In
the botched Congressional election in Sarasota FL it
was
disturbing enough to see a massive undervote deprive
approximately 13,000 Americans of their right to
vote.
But things
go wrong everywhere; they go wrong all the time.
Right? Mistakes can be remedied. Problems can be
fixed. A re-vote can be taken.
"Let them eat chad."
What
was worse
was
the cavalier and arrogant attitude with which election
officials in both Sarasota County and the office of
the Florida Secretary of State shrugged it off.
Elections Supervisor Kathy Dent's first response had
been to criticize the voters. Dent met the genuine
outcry of citizens, many
of them elderly, in a particularly patronizing
way.
"I can't
go in and hold their hand in the voting
booth," she said. "I did everything humanly possible."
Asked why so many undervotes,
Jenny Nash, the state's
Division of Elections spokeswoman, shrugged, "You
can't really get in the minds of the voter."
Dent
dismissed early complaints as partisan sniping, though
they had begun during early voting the week before,
and only grew louder on Election Day.
"Like deja vu all over again."
Mike
Lasche of Sarasota alerted officials of problems with the
system after he voted early on Oct. 25. He said the
experience "shakes my faith in electronic balloting."
Dr.
Richard Malkin
said he and his wife voted early and realized their
votes in the congressional race weren't recorded just
before electronically casting their ballots. So they
re-voted. "The lady right next to us had the same
problem. So many people said the same thing,'' said
Malkin, a Democrat who sits on a SunTrust bank board
with Buchanan.
“It's like 2000 all over again."
Some voters wrote e-mails to Dent; some to the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Dent's response contained a
reference to the group that wanted a paper trail.
"I
hope we can stop looking for ways to disrupt the
process and disenfranchise voters,” she sniffed.
"Je ne regret rien. Nada.
Niente."
The
Sarasota Herald-Tribune described Dent's attitude,
rather charitably, as “resolute defiance.”
She
insisted her workers ran “a great election”
and said she did not know the exact causes of a
18,000-vote difference between the total number of
ballots cast in Sarasota and those cast in the 13th
race.
She
said she had instructed her workers to tell voters the
race might be hard to see on the ballot. But Dent
completely ignored and not even once addressed the
problem voters complained about most: that the
machines didn’t register their vote.
As
we saw in yesterday’s story,
precinct officials said voters biggest complaint
didn’t concern the confusing ballot design, but
trouble getting the electronic touch screen to
register their votes.
The
Miami Herald quoted
precinct
official Leslie Rowland, who said the number of
complaints had led her to devise alternative
techniques for ballot casting. "I was telling
people to use their knuckles," she said.
Clueless like a fox, maybe.

Defying reality, Dent said nothing mechanical
went wrong with the county’s $4.7 million touch
screen voting machine system. “Could it be that both
candidates are from Sarasota — I don’t know,” Dent
said. “I don’t have a clue.”
She
encouraged voters who had problems to report them to
her office, but didn’t know what they would be able to
do. “After the fact, there’s not a lot we can do about
it . No way this was voter machine malfunction. It was
voter error or voter choice."
Then
she suggested the massive undervote might be due to
voters registering a protest against what became a
negative campaign.
“We
had a real heated race in the primary and I think it
turned people off. I heard from a lot of people that
didn't care for either candidate. I personally
undervoted in that race.”
A
spokeswoman for the Florida Secretary of State’s
office—a springboard for two recent Florida
Secretary’s of State to cash in by becoming lobbyists
for the election companies they only recently
regulated—repeated Dent’s suggestion.
"It
could be a protest vote. There's a lot of different
reasons people undervote. Certainly undervoting is the
voter's prerogative."
The Okie-Dokie Doctrine

It
was a curious argument. Had the two
Congressional candidates been six times nastier to
each other in Sarasota County, where the undervote was
a massive 13 percent, than in the two other counties
comprising Katherine Harris’ beloved 13th
Congressional District, both of which had just a 2
percent undervote?
"No,
I don't think we know that there is a problem," said
Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash. "After an
election, everyone is an expert. I'm not going to
speculate ... People can't just look at 18,000
votes and say there's a problem."
This of course recalls Dent's
comment, quoted here yesterday,
that "most of the voters that my poll workers talk to
actually said their vote did show up,"
suggesting that anything over 50% is
Okie-Dokie with her.
Once again "Mission Accomplished"
spoken too soon

Dent
has often sounded more like a saleswoman for Election
Systems & Software
the
company she
persuaded Sarasota County to buy $4.8 million of touch
screen machines from, than an elected official
representing the people.
She was even quoted in an E S & S press release in
October 2002, with this pithy headline:
“Election Officials, Poll Workers Throughout U.S.
Go Back to School to Prepare For November General
Election; New Election Systems & Software iVotronic
(TM) Touch Screen Voting Technology Seen by Election
Supervisors as Great Way to Vote”
After a lot of blah blah blah,
its Dent's moment to shine...
"Our primary was wonderful," said Kathy Dent,
Supervisor of Elections in Florida's Sarasota County.
After they were installed, Dent absolutely marveled at
the county's new labor saving appliance.
She
even replaced the traditional oval stickers given to
voters that say "I voted" with newer, larger decals
that state, "I voted touch screen."
“It’s the same as about touching your microwave
oven, and then you cast your vote button at the top of
the screen, and that's all there is to it. It's a real
simple process,” she told a reporter. “The voters of
Sarasota absolutely loved the system.”
Here's why you can't trust the
Democrats either
On
the question of how elections are run in
America, the people are way out in front of the
politicians. U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton,
called Sarasota’s massive undervote
"unfathomable.”
"Now
I'm not a conspiracy theorist,” Wexler
hastened to add. “But you can't help but mention that
the one county that happened
to have all the problems was actually the county that
supported the Democratic candidate for Congress."
A
great many Sarasota voters apparently had no such
reservations. "What is this that you
shouldn't talk about the possibility of conspiracy
theories," Lynn Kalish said.
"A
conspiracy of some kind is evident to me. And the only
thing that's going to satisfy me is a revote."
Others also believe skullduggery was afoot.
"It
is my suspicion that there may be an algorithm in the
software which detected voters voting for Davis and
Nelson, then skipped the screen for
Jennings-Buchanan,"
Mike Lasche
told reporters.
"I
think, frankly, that there was a problem with the
software," offered John Minder, a computer
engineer. "That seems pretty obvious. Intentional or
unintentional, I can't say."
Voters testimony more believable
than E S & S shills

Here
are some of the comments voters reported in
the days immediately after the election, as collected
by the Sarasota Herald Tribune, which then made the
unfathomable decision that it had been poor
ballot design that was the problem.
These voice deserve a national audience.
'I
know I hit the button', said Bill Krueger. But
when the voting machine had not cast a ballot in the
congressional race, he was surprised but not
particularly upset.
He
and his wife both had to use the review page twice.
"Did everyone else have this problem?" the
69-year-old Republican asked. "I never thought the
election system was crooked until this one."
Michael Sanderson's
wife warned him about the problems voters were having
with the congressional race. When the 52-year-old
registered Republican tried to tap the box for
Christine Jennings, it didn't check. He tried to hit
it a couple of more times, and it finally registered.
Yet
when he went to the review screen, the
Jennings box was not checked. He had to go back and
vote for Jennings again.
"I
hate this stuff; it should be paper ballots, period,"
he said. "I know there's hanky-panky."
"This election is not over"
"I'll
tell you this," said Cheri Potts, who works for
the Sarasota Police Department, "this election is not
over."
Joan
Nasser voted the second day of early voting. She was careful
and checked all the screens, she said, but was warned
at the end that she had not voted in the
Buchanan-Jennings race.
"I
thought, 'Well, maybe I missed a page,' which struck
me as funny because I was careful about what I
was doing," said Nasser, 73, and a Democrat.
But
the next day she heard people on the radio talking
about the same problem. "It seems to me there is
definitely something fishy there."
Martin McKee, 71,
said he pressed a vote for Jennings twice, and twice
his vote didn't register. A third try finally did the
trick.
Ruth
Barger, 83,
was sure she voted for Jennings on Election Day at
Longboat Key Town Hall. But when her final review
screen came up, she saw that her vote had not
registered. She didn't know what to do. If she
tried to fix the missing vote, she feared she might
lose everything. So she just hit the vote button and
walked out.
"It
upset me all day long," she said. "It bothered me to
no end."
"I'm 83. I thought maybe I forgot
something."
Sharon Wagner,
a 61-year-old Sarasota County
resident and retired nurse, said that she was shocked
to find both the Jennings and Buchanan boxes empty
when she reviewed her vote for the first time at the
Gulf Gate Library. "I knew that when I went through
the first time, I know I voted," said Wagner, a
Republican. "I know exactly that I voted for Christine
Jennings."
Wagner said she backtracked to the second page, and
again put in her vote for Jennings. "This time it
took," she said.
Belle Heneberger
went to the polls specifically to vote for Jennings.
Yet when she reviewed her ballot, it showed she had
not endorsed anyone in the congressional race. "I was
completely astonished," she said. "It's not an
election I wouldn't have voted on."
Helen Krate arrived at the Gulf Gate Library with a sample ballot
in hand. She had marked the sample to help her through
the process. Once she reached the final screen to
review whom she voted for, Krate noticed she had not
cast a ballot in the congressional or state House
District 70 races.
"I
was a little surprised. I'm 83 years old; maybe I
forgot something." Krate said she went back and cast
her vote for Jennings and Shapiro.
The Hospital Board Gets Dissed
Arguments
about ballot design, machine error, statistical
probabilities and the like don't sway Bertie Lou
Gentile, one of more than 500 people packing
Bayfront Park on Sunday calling for a revote in the
13th Congressional District race. The 77-year-old
Nokomis resident has a simple reason for believing
that 18,000 people didn't all intentionally skip the
congressional race Nov. 7.
"When you get more votes for the hospital board,
you know something's wrong," Gentile said.
Ellen Fedder
of Longboat Key said she's confident she voted for
Jennings correctly the first time. She said she almost
hit the "vote" button before her eye caught the review
page warning that that no vote had been recorded in
that race.
David Shapiro,
a Democratic candidate for state representative, said
the same thing happened to him when he voted Friday in
Venice. He said he's sure he went through the ballot
carefully and was particularly interested in voting
for Jennings, whom he had campaigned with. When his
review page came up, his vote for Jennings hadn't been
recorded, he said.
Thinking the unthinkable...again.

Kathy Dent isn't new to politics. She was appointed to
the Sarasota County Republican Executive Committee in
1988, and elected in 1992. She belongs to the
Republican Women's Club. She has served as a
Republican precinct committeewoman. Dent and her
husband, John, were members of the Siesta Key
Republican Club.
When first elected in 2000, Dent had no experience
with elections before running for the job. Afterwards,
she picked for her top assistant a campaign
contributor with no elections experience, but who used
to work with her husband.
As
Election Supervisor,
she established a “Vote
In Honor of a Vet program,” for which she
was accused of using her government job to push the
Republican agenda.
In a mailing paid for by the government, her office
sent out fliers
touting the military experience of an outspoken
Republican Party leader in the community who was also
an Army veteran, who called for leaders who will value
"lower taxes, limited government, a strong national
defense, faith in God and equal opportunities for
all."
Election officials saw their arrogant behavior as
normal; as business as usual. It raised a disturbing
question:
“How long has this been going on?”
What most would
prefer we all forget is that the answer to this
question may well have
relevance to the question: How did we get involved in
a war in Iraq?
Alan
Bandler
Of Longboat Key said the same thing happened when he
voted in downtown Sarasota. "I asked the poll person,
'Is something wrong here?'" Bandler said. "I voted,
and I know I voted and it didn't show up."
Bandler could have speaking for all of us: Is
something wrong?
Something is.
NEXT: THE RETURN OF GARY GREENHALGH
|