Did vote warning just slip her mind? (Sarasota voting machines)

[graywarrior]

Tom Lyons

Kathy Dent isn't talking to me.

After three days of unreturned calls, I assume Sarasota County's supervisor of elections is avoiding me. She has already made it clear she doesn't appreciate me or my column.

That's understandable. She won't like this column either.

As you have probably read, Dent got a letter last Aug. 15 from ES&S, the touch-screen voting machine company in which she has shown such faith.

It reported that voter complaints elsewhere led ES&S to do tests on the kind of touch-screen system Dent uses. The tests confirmed a problem with "slow response times" when voters made choices. The delays "vary from terminal to terminal and also may not occur every single time a terminal is used."

Details were scarce, but the letter did promise this wouldn't result in vote-counting problems.

Clearly, though, it could make voters wonder what was up and lead some to press a candidate's name multiple times.

The company said it had a software patch to fix the problem, and would submit it to the state in time for the November 2006 general election.

That patch never appeared. In fact, Division of Elections spokesman Sterling Ivey now says the division never even got a copy of that letter.

Dent decided, wisely or not, not to even post a polling booth notice sent by ES&S to warn voters they might experience delayed screen responses.

I won't second-guess that call.

But, as you will recall, the general election spawned a fiasco: a massive 18,000-undervote mystery in the District 13 congressional race that elected Republican Vern Buchanan.

And the huge undervote rate, 13 percent, showed up only in Sarasota County and only on touch-screen ballots.

The mystery inspired a still-ongoing lawsuit by the close second-place finisher, Democrat Christine Jennings. There was a Division of Elections audit and tedious and expensive tests of the machines.

But what's most remarkable to me about that letter from ES&S, which we just learned about a few days ago, isn't any great likelihood now that this touch-screen delay issue somehow significantly contributed to the huge undervote. Alec Yasinsac, a Florida State University professor of computer science who led some of the tests, says he thinks his team has now pretty well ruled that out.

But want to guess how his team learned of the slow response problem, so it could do the tests?

Not from Dent. Not from ES&S. And not from the Division of Elections. A team member found mention of it on some blogsite.

Don't forget, the election mystery included numerous reports from voters -- even one from Buchanan's wife -- that they had to press two or more times before votes in that race would register. That, we can now guess, was at least sometimes caused by that sporadic delay issue the ES&S had reported.

Why didn't Dent reveal that warning letter before the election, as a heads up?

But if that call was no big deal, this one is: Dent didn't reveal that letter even when she started getting and acknowledging complaints about the touch-screen response in the District 13 race, during early voting or on Election Day.

And finally, Dent and her lawyer didn't hand it over when Jennings' lawyers made legally binding written demands for all such communications between Dent's office and ES&S.

It just seems grossly implausible, given all the reports from voters to poll workers about voting machine oddities, that Dent didn't recall that ES&S warning, and see a very likely connection.

But as I said, she's not sharing her thoughts with me.

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