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.
From CQ:
A House task force will investigate allegations that voting machine errors contributed to the razor-thin victory by Republican Vern Buchanan in Florida's 13th Congressional District.
By voice vote, the three-member House Administration Committee task force agreed to launch a formal investigation. They also agrees to use GAO experts to design a reliability test for the voting machines in question.
As expected, there's disagreement:
Republicans on the full committee, including Vernon J. Ehlers of Michigan, the ranking minority member, have argued that Congress should defer to the Florida court system. Democrats said such deference is not necessary.
"It's not a precedential requirement that we wait forever for the courts to act," said Democrat Zoe Lofgren of California, one of the members of the task force, which is headed by Democrat Charlie Gonzalez of Texas.
I just wanted to quickly let everyone know that the New York Times today has an editorial in praise of Sen. Feinstein's work in the Senate to require all electronic voting machines to produce a voter-verifiable paper ballot. The headline sums up the heart of the paper ballot movement - "Making Democracy Credible."
It is good news that Ms. Feinstein has called for the federal investigations -- and that she is pushing a bill to require paper trails nationally. As long as there are no paper records, and voting machine manufacturers continue to insist that the software that runs the machines is a "trade secret," voters cannot be expected to trust that votes are being counted correctly. The leadership in Congress needs to focus on making sure that Ms. Feinstein's paper-trail bill becomes law, along with a companion House measure from Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey.
The editorial contains some other turns of phrase that I particularly like, such as:
Common Blog
