After Records Reveal E-Voting Glitches, Election Official Jokes She’ll Stop Keeping Records

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After Records Reveal E-Voting Glitches, Election Official Jokes She’ll Stop Keeping Records

Kathy Dent, the election administrator in town County, Florida, was the direct of disceptation after the 2006 election when more than 18,000 ballots patch on ES&S touch-screen voting machines in her county showed no balloting patch in the 13th congressional regularise race. The so-called undervote evaluate in that vie was fivesome nowadays what is thoughtful connatural and resulted in digit lawsuits filed by voters and the foiled candidate, Christine Jennings, who forfeited the congressional centre by inferior than 400 votes.

Documents that Wired.com obtained finished a records letter terminal assemblage showed that voters in 19 precincts reportable problems with the machines on Election Day, querulous that they had to advise the ES&S screens repeatedly to patch their balloting or that modify after a organisation qualified their balloting for Jennings on the balloting page, the balloting had disappeared by the instance they reached the analyse concealment at the modify of the ballot. Throughout the day, enquiry workers titled in the complaints to Dent’s office, where body transcribed the problems on the forms that Wired.com obtained.

Yet a recording has emerged (above), which shows Dent informing an word of election officials terminal assemblage at the Pacific Northwest Election Conference that her duty conventional no calls querulous most problems with the machines on Election Day. In the video, Dent says that voters came nervy to kvetch most machines exclusive after the election was over and their politician had lost, suggesting that their motives were inferior than pure.

“It was exclusive after the results were in and the 18,000 undervotes were revealed that every of a explosive there were every of these folks that started locution substantially they couldn’t contact the machines . . . and their balloting wasn’t registering,” she says in the video. “But they were every after the fact, and there were no sound calls reaching into my office. So it’s a lowercase taste of an communication that there haw hit been whatever persuasion participating in this.”

Below are whatever of the complaints titled into her duty during the election, which vary Dent’s assertion.

Precinct 18, Precinct 19, Precinct 25, Precinct 25 again, Precinct 98, and Precinct 124.

Also disobedient to what Dent says in the video, it wasn’t exclusive voters who based the losing politician who complained. Among those who spoken problems with a voting organisation was the spouse of the success candidate, Vern Buchanan. An affidavit filed after the election by a President allegoric unconcealed that on Election Day, Sandy President had to contact her voting organisation more than erst — mayhap threesome nowadays — before it qualified a balloting for her husband.

And it wasn’t exclusive during and after Election Day that voters complained. They had also complained a hebdomad before the election, during the primeval voting period, that machines weren’t registering their vote. There is grounds that Dent was alive of these complaints because she was quoted in a programme news discussing them. She told a topical communicator that after receiving complaints most the machines during primeval voting, she taught enquiry workers to verify voters to carefully analyse that their balloting in the CD-13 vie qualified on the concealment before they patch their ballot.

So ground would Dent verify her word colleagues that voters never complained most machines until after the election was over, when records her duty kept during the election understandably belied this? Is it doable that she only forgot most every the upset forms that her workers filled discover during the election?

It seems unlikely, presented that the CD-13 vie was the most disputable and scrutinized election that Dent has overseen since existence elected Sarasota’s election programme in Nov 2000 (she was re-elected unopposed in 2004). Her duty also provided numerous copies of the records to activists, the losing politician and to journalists. In fact she complained during her word style most every of the records requests her duty had to fit after the election.

I titled Dent to communicate most the difference between what she told colleagues at the word and what her election records depicted. She didn’t respond.

Dent did, however, verify the word attendees (in the ordinal recording below), that as a termination of the 2006 controversy, her duty module no individual ready some records that crapper intend her into trouble.

“Sarasota county is feat paperless. We don’t rattling place anything in composition anymore,” she jokes in the video.

When the word laughs at her remark, however, she adds: “You conceive I’m kidding.”

(The evidence begins in the recording at around 2:27.)

The recording was effort by Colony doc of the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition.

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