18,000 Votes Missing In Election For Katherine Harris' Old Seat...Republican Has Declared Victory...

Salon Tim Grieve November 13, 2006 11:03 PM

Among all the reports logged last Tuesday by election-protection hotline numbers, the most serious complaints were from voters in Florida's Sarasota County, where the vagaries of the electronic voting process may have determined the outcome of the election. As a result, Democrat Christine Jennings has not conceded, even though Republican Vern Buchanan has already declared victory

In Sarasota County, 18,000 voters -- fully 13 percent of people who voted -- did not cast a ballot for either Buchanan or Jennings, a huge "undervote" when compared to the adjacent counties, where the percentage of voters not casting a ballot in the same race was about 2 percent. Some election officials have suggested that those voters in Sarasota intentionally chose not to cast a vote in that race, as a protest against an ugly campaign. But the unusually high undervote rate compared to the neighboring counties makes that highly unlikely: "The idea that this is some kind of protest vote simply makes no sense," says Mark Lindeman, a political scientist at Bard College.

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