If there was any doubts as to whether Democrats would take a hands-on approach to the election dispute in Florida's 13th District, Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA) resolved them late last week.

Millender-McDonald, the Chairwoman of the committee in charge of handling Democrat Christine Jennings' challenge of the election results, sent a pointed letter last Thursday to the Florida appeals court hearing the case, warning that if the courts did not adequately investigate the case, then Congress would be forced to get involved.

In February, the appeals court will decide whether to uphold a lower court's ruling preventing Jennings from examining the voting machines' source code as part of her election contest. Jennings' lawyers, who've offered testimony from dozens of voters about problems with the machines and say they could offer hundreds more, say they need access to the source code in order to adequately investigate the cause of the problems.

In the letter, Millender-McDonald wrote that her "Committee is closely following the course of the litigation now underway in Florida" and that it was "of concern" that Jennings hadn't received access "to the hardware and software (including the source code) needed to test the contestant's central claim: voting machine malfunction."

"[R]esolution of these issues may obviate the need for the House to address them," the Chairwoman noted.

Well, well, well. Another wrinkle in the post-election battle down in Florida's 13th District.

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) has taken every opportunity to blast Democrat Christine Jennings for challenging the results of November's election in the district, even accusing her of "destroying democracy." But now it turns out that his own wife came to him about her own voting problems on Election Day.

"Mrs. Sandy Buchanan indicated on November 7, 2006 that she had difficulty registering her vote for Buchanan. [Vern Buchanan] did not respond to this complaint as the period for voting had nearly ended," reads a recent court filing by Buchanan (you can read it here). A memo by Buchanan's spokeswoman also turned over to Jennings as part of a court filing gives more detail:

"...on Election Day... Mrs. Buchanan indicated that she had to hit the button more than once, I think she said three times -- to record her vote for Mr. Buchanan."

Jennings has cited the testimony of hundreds of Sarasota County voters who had difficulties voting just like Sandy Buchanan to buffer her contention that electronic machine glitches cost her the election.

From the AP:

Two signature gatherers charged with tricking Orange County voters into registering as Republicans were sentenced to three years’ probation....

According to prosecutors, the recruiters went to shopping malls and campuses and asked residents to sign petitions for lower taxes or stricter sex offender laws, then tricked them into signing voter registration cards for the Republican party. The registration drive paid up to $10 per registrant.

In a ruling handed down today, a Florida judge denied access to voting machines' source code by experts for Democrat Christine Jennings and others.

Jennings, along with the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, People for the American Way Foundation and others, had asked the court to allow them access to the source code on voting machines used in Sarasota County, where they allege 18,000 votes were not counted.

Judge William L. Gary called their request "nothing more than conjecture and not supported by credible evidence," and said that making the secret code available for scrutiny "would result in destroying or at least gutting the protections afforded those who own the trade secrets."

A senior attorney on Jennings' side of the suit called Gary's ruling "an order without any legal basis whatsoever."

The judge "denied the voters of Sarasota County the ability to look inside the ballot boxes, essentially, that they're using to cast their ballot," David Becker, attorney for the People for the American Way Foundation, told me. "We're going to use every available avenue to see that this order is overturned."

Update: Here's the ruling.

Florida Democrat Christine Jennings said today she won't try to block Republican Vern Buchanan from being sworn in to represent the state's 13th District, despite her efforts to have that election declared unconstitutional.

In November's elections, Buchanan beat out Jennings by fewer than 400 votes to win the seat, but Jennings has contested the election both in Florida courts and before Congress.

"Christine is not conceding," her deputy campaign manager Robert Kellar explained to me by phone. After consulting with constituents, her staff and Democratic leadership, she "decided it would be best for the district to allow [Buchanan] to be seated temporarily," until the election disputes are sorted out.

Kellar said Jennings had the option of filing an official challenge to seating Buchanan in the 110th Congress, but opted not to. "If a constituent has a problem with Social Security or something, they need someone to go to," Kellar explained. She has, however, "contested" the election with Congress, which is a different process.

Kellar said that staffers for the House Administration Committee have received Jennings' formal contest and are currently investigating the matter. More on that soon.

Update: An earlier version of this post reported that election results showed Buchanan beat Jennings by 18,000 votes. That was incorrect; results showed Buchanan won by 369 votes. At issue in the dispute are an estimated 18,000 votes that may not have been properly registered.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) is set to announce he will back a challenge to the FL-13 election lodged by Democratic candidate Christine Jennings.

According to a press release from Holt's office, the congressman will announce at noon today that "he intends to take steps to put the House on record that no action taken on January 4, 2007 regarding the disputed election in Florida will prejudice the legal case or any investigation of the House Administration Committee."

Jennings, who is contesting her November loss to Republican Vern Buchanan, has already won the support of Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has so far remained silent on the issue, other than to say she is "monitoring" the situation.

Misleading automated calls designed to turn North Carolina voters against Democrat Heath Shuler may have come from a GOP campaign firm controlled by the D.C. lobbying giant, Dutko Worldwide.

The calls, whose impact favored the (doomed) re-election campaign of Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC), pretended to come from the Shuler camp, and came as late as 2:30 a.m., according to one report.

Taylor's campaign paid Direct Strategies over $113,000 for "phone calls" and "calling" services, according to filings at FECInfo.com.

Despite the calls Shuler beat Taylor 54 percent to 46 percent, and will represent North Carolina's 11th District when Congress convenes next month.

The race is the third known to have been hit with misleading robo calls that are circumstantially tied to the Tallahassee, Fla.-based firm Direct Strategies. Similar calls against Democrats in Nebraska and Pennsylvania coincide with payments to the firm from the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC).

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A Florida-based Republican political firm with circumstantial ties to at least two nasty robocalling efforts this year isn't quite as obscure as we thought.

In the last days of the 2006 elections, Direct Strategies, Inc. of Tallahassee saw its name connected to dirty-tricks robo calls in Nebraska and Pennsylvania. Run by two state-level GOP operatives, the firm did not appear to cut a swaggering figure in national politics.

Here's the thing: according to filings with the state of Florida, "Direct Strategies, Inc." doesn't exist. It voluntarily dissolved in April 2005. In its place rose a new company, "Dutko Direct Strategies, Inc.," which appears to be controlled by one of Washington's largest lobby firms.

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A new investigation into harassing robo calls from November´s election may lead to the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC).

The Nebraska Public Service Commission has launched an investigation into one of one of the more egregious examples of attempted voter suppression this year. In the 3rd District there, voters reported receiving repeated (often back-to-back) calls featuring a recorded voice that seemed to belong to Democrat Scott Kleeb. The calls, which went out to an unknown number of Nebraskans, prompted a flood of complaints to Kleeb´s campaign office.

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Next year, the House of Representatives will have to decide what to do about the contested election in Florida's 13th District. Republicans have characterized the Democrats' challenge of the results as a desperate power grab. But here's something to crystallize the issue -- a voting expert representing the manufacturer of the machines has written that there were certainly major problems in the election, and that those problems cost Democrat Christine Jennings the election.

Yesterday, Prof. Michael Herron of Dartmouth testified on behalf of Election Systems & Software Inc. in the state court battle over the election results. He argued that the design of the ballot (which you can see here) was at fault for the large "undervote" in Florida's Sarasota County, where voting machines did not register a vote in the congressional race for approximately 14% of voters. But while he may argue that machine glitches weren't at fault for the result, he doesn't dispute that something went wrong on Election Day.

“It is hard to imagine that the Sarasota result reflects deliberate voter choices," reads a report (pdf) issued earlier this month by Herron and his colleagues on Florida's 13th District. Even more tellingly, Herron found that "there is essentially a 100 percent chance that Jennings would have won the CD 13 race had Sarasota voters" voted in another county.

So keep that in mind as the battle heads further along in court and into Congress. The dispute is not whether voting irregularities cost Jennings the election -- among experts, even opposing experts, that issue is largely settled. It did. The dispute, in court at least, is whether those irregularities were caused in significant part by glitches in the machines, as Jennings has argued, or simply by bad ballot design.

Any way you cut it, it's clear that the robo call really arrived this year -- and was mostly overlooked as a prominent new weapon in campaign strategists' arsenals.

Underscoring its reputation as a "stealth" campaign tactic, a new poll shows that two-thirds of registered voters got at least one robo call during the midterm election season.

The poll, conducted by The Pew Internet and American Life Project, found that 64% of registered U.S. voters got at least one recorded phone call in 2006. And that's across the country -- you can bet that percentage was much higher in competitive districts.

Only direct mail was a more popular method for campaigns, reaching 71% of voters. But the robo call blew out other more traditional forms of campaigning like going door to door (only 18% of voters were reached that way) or getting a phone call from a real live human being (24%). Pew didn't even bother to track robo calling in 2004.

So, what percentage of those who got a robo call got two, three, or a dozen more? How many got six calls in a row? We still don't know.

It's official -- the election mess in Florida's 13th District is heading to the House of Representatives. January will be an interesting month, indeed.

Meanwhile the court case in Florida proceeds along. Today, an expert testifed on behalf of Democrat Christine Jennings that glitches with the voting machines cost her the election.

Details about the challenge are provided in the Jennings campaign press release below. You can read our prior coverage of Florida's 13th here.

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Who says we're not spreading democracy in Iraq?

Not long after Republicans harrassed tens of thousands of Americans with automated phone messages in November's election, news comes that the robo call, that staple of American democracy, is being deployed in Iraq. And it's literally terrorizing city residents.

Nir Rosen of the new blog Iraqslogger reports, calling it a "mysterious psychological operations campaign," that Baghdad residents have reported "receiving phone calls that the caller ID shows to be originating from outside Iraq." What follows is a "recorded message from an anonymous man speaking formal Arabic" who goes on to condemn the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia headed by the powerful cleric Muqtada al Sadr that's been a continual thorn in the U.S.'s side.

The Mahdi Army has also infiltrated police ranks, and run assassination squads. Fearing that the militia's inside men have access to wiretapping technology, ordinary Iraqis live in fear that their robocall will be picked up and intepreted as proof they are anti-Mahdi -- and face execution at the militia's hands. The call reportedly left one Iraqi woman in tears.

Like the non-lethal American variety of robo call, the source of the Iraqi calls has been cloaked, and no one has figured out where they're coming from. Or how to stop them.

Democrat Christine Jennings will challenge last month's election results in the House of Representatives. What will Democrats do about it?

Jennings spokeswoman Kathy Vermazen told me today that there's no doubt that she'll be lodging a contest with the House -- it's only a matter of time. Most likely, it'll happen close to the December 20th filing deadline. So when the new Congress starts up in the new year, they'll find this thorny issue on the doorstep.

While it's crystal clear what Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean thinks about it, the woman who'll be in charge isn't showing her hand. Nancy Pelosi's office has been responding to comment requests by saying that she's "monitoring" the situation.

Republican Vern Buchanan made a rollicking, rambling appearance on Hannity and Colmes last night, during which he accused Democrat Christine Jennings of "destroying democracy" by contesting the election results.

The issue in the race, of course, is that electronic voting machines failed to register a vote in the congressional race from more than 13 percent of Sarasota County voters -- a rate far higher than other counties and absentee ballots. That statistical aberration or "undervote" has led experts and other reasonable people to declare that something went wrong in the race. But not Buchanan, who enjoyed a victory by a 400-vote margin, and not Sean Hannity.

For those even passingly familiar with the details of the race, the segment is excruciating. You can watch it here:

In the segment, Hannity and Buchanan refer repeatedly to the recounts of the race (despite the fact that paperless electronic voting machines prevent a meaningful recount), which showed no significant shift in the vote counts, to buttress the notion that Democrats are attempting a power grab. Hannity falsely asserted that Democrats "want the court to declare that the Democrat won," when in fact Democrats are asking for a new election (as Hannity had actually stated earlier in the segment).

In response to questions from Alan Colmes as to why the undervote occurred, Buchanan gave a glass-is-half-full spin, emphasizing "the 238,000 people that did vote in this race." He had no explanation for the undervote, only offering, "I just think it was a competitive race; there’s a lot of speculation out there you can read.”

Speaking of speculation you can read, a group of political science professors have issued a study (pdf) on the election, finding that the undervote was caused mainly by ballot design -- a similar conclusion as that drawn in an analysis by The Sarasota Herald Tribune -- and that had there not been a high undervote, Christine Jennings would have won the election.

More fun down in Florida, where Democrat Christine Jennings is challenging the official tally that shows she lost by fewer than 400 votes to Republican Vern Buchanan.

First, a little inappropriate commentary from the officials: in today's Sarasota Herald Tribune, David Drury, who's overseeing the audit, opined on its probable outcome:

... [Drury] said he expects "nothing" to be revealed from [the audit's examination of voting machines' source code]. "They're not going to find anything. It is my belief, and I rarely like to speculate but it is based upon the parallel testing, that there will be nothing found in the source code that will explain the undervote."

Hey, it's Florida! What do you expect from the election officials down there?

A little better than what we're getting, apparently. As People for the American Way protested in a statement reacting to Drury's remarks, one doesn't want "the guy in charge of the audit announcing his predictions about the outcome before the investigation of software code even begins."

Second, an analysis of Election Day data by the Herald Tribune has led the paper to declare that they know the primary reason that more than 18,000 Sarasota County voters failed to register a vote in the race: ballot design.

The reason they think that? Take a look at the ballot:

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The post-election dispute in Florida's 13th District won't have an easy answer, it seems.

The state completed their second test run of the machines on Friday without a hitch in the congressional race. Election officials will continue on to the next phase of the audit, which involves a variety of tests on the machines' hardware and software, but hopes (never very high among Democrats) are diminishing that the state's tests will find the reason that the Sarasota County machines failed to register more than 18,000 votes in the congressional race Election Day.

As election officials continue a less public array of tests on the machines (here's a good rundown on the audit), Democrat Christine Jennings, whose lawyer has argued that Florida's audit is hopelessly inadequate, will argue in court that she should be able to run outside checks on the machines. No court date has yet been set for that showdown. Jennings also has until December 20th to contest the election in the House of Representatives.

But as all that moves forward, it's worth giving this a look -- video of some of the dozens of Sarasota County voters who showed up to a recent People for the American Way meeting to recount their troubles voting on the machines. Jennings' lawsuit challenging the election results also included a host of voter testimonials.

We hear that the state's audit team has concluded their examination of Tuesday's mock vote, and attributed any discrepancies that cropped up during the exercise to human error.

On Tuesday, the state's "mock vote" -- its first run of tests on electronic voting machines in Florida's Sarasota County -- unexpectedly handed five extra votes to Democrat Christine Jennings, out of 251 ballots cast. At the time, Florida Division of Elections officials predicted they were the result of human error. After monitoring video of the votes they reaffirmed that belief, deciding that all five votes were the result of mistakes by election officials doing the voting.

On Friday, the audit moves on to its second phase, a similar run of tests on five machines that were actually used on Election Day.

Meanwhile, Jennings' legal contest of the election results is on hold pending the state's audit. If the process concludes without discovering any system errors, Jennings' camp would have to convince the state judge to allow them to run independent tests. Jennings' lawyer has strongly criticized the audit as insufficient.

More later.

Update: Jennings has added ES&S to their lawsuit challenging the election results, a step necessary to force the company to grant access to the machines' "source code," the company's software embedded in each machine.

As we noted yesterday, the state's first run of tests on electronic voting machines in Florida's Sarasota County unexpectedly handed five extra votes to Democrat Christine Jennings.

Since then, the Division of Elections has been busily trying to figure out what went wrong. But despite a full day of analysis that did not explain the discrepancy, the department's spokesperson is still insisting that "human error" is to blame. They just need more time to figure out how.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that whatever problems caused electronic machines not to register a vote in the congressional race for more than 18,000 voters in the county on Election Day, the problem affected Democrats more than Republicans.

From The Orlando Sentinel:

...Tuesday, Stanford University professor David Dill said his examination of ballot data supported that conclusion.

Dill, an electronic-voting expert, found that 5,304 people whose ballots showed no selection in the congressional race voted a straight Democratic ticket on the five statewide races. He found that 3,290 voted straight Republican. [Republican Vern Buchanan won the official tally by fewer than 400 votes.]

"Something's going on there," Dill said. "But I'm not sure what yet."

Yesterday, Florida's Division of Elections began its audit of the election results in Florida's Sarasota County. The results? "Intriguing," according to Democrat Christine Jennings' lawyer Kendall Coffey.

All day yesterday, election workers sat in glass booths and voted accorded to a predetermined script designed to mimic the voting on Election Day. The entire process was videotaped and monitored by the campaigns and the press.

The tests, performed on backup machines, didn't really turn out the way anyone expected. "Of the 251 ballots cast" in the audit, "five additional votes were counted for Jennings, including three extra votes in one precinct," according to The Herald Tribune.

Jennings has contested the official election results, of course, because the electronic machines didn't register votes in the congressional race for more than 18,000 Sarasota County voters, about fifteen percent, an abnormally high rate. But yesterday's results didn't register an unexpectedly high "undervote" rate. Instead, the tests seemed to give a few extra votes to Jennings.

But an incorrect result is an incorrect result, and so Coffey, who has denounced the audit for being insufficiently rigorous, said in a prepared statement that "the discrepancies are intriguing."

The spokesperson for the Division of Elections, meanwhile, was quick to attribute the discrepancies to "human error." Today, the audit team will doublecheck their math and monitor the video of yesterday's mock election to see if that's the case.

On Friday, the second round of the audit will involve similar tests on machines actually used on Election Day.

The election battle continues in Florida's 13th District this week, as the state begins its audit of electronic voting machines. At issue is why Sarasota County's electronic voting machines failed to register a vote in Florida's 13th District congressional race for more than 18,000 voters, an "undervote" rate far higher than the 13th's other counties. Analyses of those undervotes show that they cost Jennings (who lost the official tally to Republican Vern Buchanan by fewer than 400 votes) the race.

But that audit, conducted by the state's Division of Elections, has drawn criticism for a number of reasons. As we noted last week, the state's lead computer expert is a die-hard Republican. The conditions of the audit have also drawn fire from Democrat Christine Jennings camp.

Speaking earlier today, Jennings lawyer Kendall Coffey pointed to what he saw as key deficiencies in the audit, which might undermine Jennings' efforts to contest the election results. Jennings' lawsuit is on hold until the state completes its audit this Friday.

Above all, Coffey said that the state's process went against "the basic notion of an audit that it's supposed to be independent." Instead, "the same state agency that is responsible for the reliability of voting systems and software are now conducting an audit to find out where that agency created problems."

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There was already strong evidence that the worryingly high "undervote" in the congressional race in Florida's Sarasota County had skewed the results of the election there.

But The Orlando Sentinel actually went through nearly all of the roughly 18,000 ballots on electronic voting machines where voters had failed to register a vote in the congressional race, but had voted in the other races, and found that the voters were mostly Democrats.

From the Sentinel:

The group of nearly 18,000 voters that registered no choice in Sarasota's disputed congressional election solidly backed Democratic candidates in all five of Florida's statewide races, an Orlando Sentinel analysis of ballot data shows.

Among these voters, even the weakest Democrat -- agriculture-commissioner candidate Eric Copeland -- outpaced a much-better-known Republican incumbent by 551 votes....

Republican Vern Buchanan's 369-vote victory was certified by state officials Monday. His camp says that, although people may have skipped the race -- intentionally or not -- there is no evidence that votes went missing.

But the results of the Sentinel analysis, two experts said, warrant additional investigation.

"Wow," University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato said. "That's very suggestive -- I'd even say strongly suggestive -- that if there had been votes recorded, she [Jennings] would have won that House seat."...

The analysis of the so-called "undervotes" examined the races for U.S. Senate, governor, attorney general, chief financial officer and agriculture commissioner.

The results showed that the undervoted ballots skewed Democratic in all of those races, even in the three races in which the county as a whole went Republican.

Activist groups have filed a second lawsuit contesting the election results in Florida's 13th, arguing that electronic voting machines may have robbed voters of their true choice.

The suit, filed by watchdog groups Voter Action, People For the American Way Foundation, the ACLU of Florida, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, follows swiftly on Christine Jennings contest filed yesterday. You can read Jennings' suit here, which includes a number of voter testimonials about problems on Election Day.

Elliot Mincberg, Legal Director for PAWF, said that he expected the judge to consolidate the two suits and have them proceed together.

The lawsuits, however, comrpise just one of the avenues by which the election's results will be challenged.

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