shouting loudly

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, several groups accused elections officials in Sarasota County, Florida, of negligence resulting in thousands of undervotes for a hotly contested US House seat. The suit asks for a re-vote.

In the race between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings, elections officials had certified Buchanan as the winner, by a razor-thin margin of 369 votes. This margin is in doubt, the groups allege, because more than 18,000 ballots in the county registered no vote in the race. This is an unusually high undervote in such a close race.

The groups, People for the American Way, Voter Action, American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, and Electronic Frontier Foundation, lodged the complaint on behalf of the citizens of the county. As CNet observes:

The advocacy groups’ complaint (click here for PDF) charges that Sarasota Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent failed to adequately investigate, identify or report various alleged malfunctions in the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machines after receiving multiple complaints from voters and pollworkers during a two-week early voting period.

Ironically, voters overwhelmingly voted “Yes” for a referendum that would scrap the touchscreen machines and substitute an SAT-like optical scanning system.