Poor Judgment by Florida Judge
By David Fialkov -- Intern
Posted on Tue Jun 19, 2007 at 02:21:25 PM EST
You might recall the post-election controversy last November where Democrat Christine Jennings lost a Florida House race to Republican Vern Buchanan by 369 votes in an election where approximately 18,000 votes in Democratic-leaning Sarasota County were "missing."
What do you mean "missing"? you might ask. After today, we will probably never know. A three judge panel ruled today that Ms. Jennings will not be allowed to review the programming source code of the paperless electronic voting that "lost" the votes. Such codes, the the trial and appeals court ruled, should remain secret to protect the machine company's patented code.
Fortunately, in the world of law, there are ways to remedy a situation wherein evidence is both (1) necessary to reaching a sufficient conclusion to a conflict and (2) protected for one reason or another. Such cases generally arise in patent cases, such as this one, cases in which a party's medical records are in dispute.
When such disputes arise, judges and/or professional, non-biased experts review the evidence behind closed doors (or "in camera") and reach a conclusion regarding the relevance of the evidence. For example, in Florida, computer scientists COULD HAVE examined the source code of the machines "in camera" to determine if the 18,000 ballots were lost due to a machine error, or if the voters just abstained in that election.
Why the Florida judges didn't order such a review is beyond me...so is the fact that some elections in this country are still conducted using paperless voting machines.
Tags: Election Reform, paper ballot, Florida, Christine Jennings (all tags)
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