 |
Sarasota Blues |
 |
Amidst the assembly and launch of the Democrat-dominated 110th Congress, one newly-elected Republican receives a frosty reception.
The January 4 swearing-in of former car salesman and Florida Representative Vern Buchanan was overshadowed when his Democratic colleagues formally conditioned his instatement on the outcome of legal disputes surrounding his election.
US House Representatives Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) and Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-California) requested these terms because Buchanan’s victory in Florida’s 13th congressional district is still being actively contested in state courts. This high-profile race in Sarasota County, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, was closely and viciously fought between Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings. Ironically, the seat belonged previously to Representative Katherine Harris, Florida’s infamous former Secretary of State who certified Florida’s 2000 vote for George W. Bush.
November 7 saw Buchanan declared the winner by a 369-vote margin. However, 18,000 votes in his race were registered as “no vote†by Sarasota’s electronic voting machines, effectively going “missing†in the annals of voting software and source code.
A group of Sarasota voters immediately filed suit with the State of Florida, as did Jennings separately, requesting that the State overturn the election’s certification and hold a revote. The State conducted an “audit†of the election. (The “audit†replaces the “recount†in today’s world of electronic voting, as electronic voting machines leave no paper ballots to be recounted.)
With dubious procedures on a tiny sample set of machines, the Florida Division of Elections attempted to simulate voting on the machines in question, determining that the certified results were good – despite the fact that even the simulated “election” produced discrepancies between actual votes and reported results. (Incidentally, on November 7 Sarasota voters also approved a referendum scrapping electronic voting machines and requiring voter-verified paper ballots in all Sarasota elections by 2008.)
Florida Elections Officials then responded (and I’m not joking) by asking the Sarasota voters filing the suit to release portions of their medical records, and reveal whether they had been drinking or under the influence of drugs on election day.
As Muslima Lewis of the Florida ACLU, one of the organizations representing the plaintiffs noted, “It defies credibility that 18,000 voters couldn’t see, or were impaired by drugs or alcohol when they voted, especially when most, if not all, of them managed to cast their votes in other races on the same ballot.â€Â
Both Jennings and the Sarasota voters then turned their attention to the iVotronic, the high tech, controversial electronic voting machine used in Sarasota elections, which many believe holds the secrets to the missing 18,000 votes. Both lawsuits filed motions to access the iVotronic software and source code, which they viewed as crucial evidence in determining whether Sarasota’s machines malfunctioned – or worse, were “misprogrammed†— on November 7. However, iVotronic’s manufacturer, Elections Systems & Software (ES&S) objected, defending its source code as a proprietary trade secret.
But the plaintiffs argue that iVotronic source code should in fact be a matter of public record. Trade secrets, they maintain, should not be afforded protection where they represent the only record of how citizens actually voted and blatantly impede election transparency, especially when Sarasota voters had virtually no say in (and have since vetoed) their county’s decision to adopt paperless electronic voting systems in the wake of the 2000 and 2004 Florida voting fiascoes.
On December 29, Florida Circuit Judge William Gary denied Jennings and the Sarasota voters access to the source code, stating that such access would unnecessarily “destroy†or “at least gut†those protections afforded ES&S’s as owner of a trade secret.
Vern Buchanan set off for Washington.
To his annoyance, however, at least some members of the 110th US Congress agree with the Sarasota voters, and are refusing to let the start of Congressional business pull the plug on their lawsuit.
Upon Buchanan’s swearing-in, Congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald, who chairs the Committee on House Administration, sent a letter to the Florida appeals court next in line to address the lawsuit urging them to bring transparency to the Sarasota election. She expressed concern that “the lower court declined to order the requested access to the hardware and software (including the source code) needed to test the contestant’s central claim: voting machine malfunction,†adding that this evidence “bears decisively on the prospect of conclusively establishing who was duly elected on November 7th.â€Â
The Sarasota debacle brings to a head the ongoing national debate of whether unaccountable, private entities using proprietary, nontransparent source code have any role in public elections. ES&S is one of the four main (the others being Diebold, Sequoia, and Hart Intercivic) privately-owned election “management†firms contracted by public jurisdictions worldwide to design, record, count, and report votes. Nevertheless, there have been widespread, documented instances of machine malfunction, tampering vulnerabilities, and blatant conflicts of interest (including personal and financial relationships) between manufacturers and candidates.
The Seminal awaits news from Florida’s First District Court of Appeal on whether ES&S’s proprietary “rights†will continue to legally trump those of Floridians to choose their government in a transparent manner.
Because of the Democrat bullsh*t The Seminal people have been f**k out of there land,lied to and totaly sh*t on and i am sick of listening to there liberal crap and they can take there north american union and stick it were the sun don`t shine!