Sarasota Herald Tribune: Sample ballot was different from screen

[eomer]

Sample ballot was different from screen

By BOB MAHLBURG

[e-mail]
SARASOTA COUNTY -- Problems in Sarasota County voting booths last month may have started long before Election Day.

In an effort to save money, Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent mailed a simplified sample ballot to every voter in the county.

The sample ballot was similar to what voters saw when they entered voting booths. But key differences between the two ballots may have helped stoke voter confusion and exacerbated problems voters had finding the District 13 congressional race on touch-screen machines, experts say.

-snip-

Florida law requires that all sample ballots "shall be in the form of the official ballot as it will appear at the polling place on Election Day."

Sending voters a sample ballot like Sarasota's that is not identical to computer voting "... sounds like it's in contradiction of the law," Norden said.

-snip-

More...

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. We need a new election in District 13

This is such crap. You know how many people use those sample ballots when they go to vote? I know I do.

If the sample is not the same as what you will see on the machine, then it is not a sample.

[rzemanfl]

3. But it has "sampliness." n/t

[babylonsister]

2. Intentional manipulation, and who is Kathy Dent? Amazing that a

mere supervisor of elections can effect the outcome of an election so flagrantly. What's the punishment for that?

[DoYouEverWonder]

4. Apparently, nothing

this is the same thing Teresa LaPore did with her butterfly ballot.

[w4rma]

7. Teresa LaPore got voted out in her next election. (nt)

[philb]

5. Sarasota voters reported more differences than these to me is describing what they saw

Some say their ballot was a butterfly ballot design with the Congressional race on one page and Jennings by herself with no race context on next page.

Some say the order of the Gov & Cong. race was reversed from what is described here, with the Gov. race highlighted and
Cong. race 2 candidates not highlighted and looking like the bottom of a long list of minor candidates in the Gov. race.

Have they checked all of the machines that had undervotes, to see what was actually on those screens??
I hear that there were as many as 9 ballot versions. Is that wrong?

[philb]

6. Ballot design was not the only problem, there were "disappearing votes" in Sarasota- similar to

those in a lot of races throughout the country that had disappearing votes on touch screens in 2004 and 2006.

This seems to be done either by default to blank, where the default is sometimes hard to override, and some don't
accomplish this. Default to blank would give correct votes if all who wanted to vote for a candidate were successful in overriding the default, but on some machines this is difficult.

Another way is just a delayed programming glitch where you see the vote recorded initially, but on a time delay the
vote disappears after a set time as you go on to other races. This was seen a lot in 2004 in Mahoning Co. Ohio and Broward Co. Florida and other places.
www.flcv.com/fraudpat.html
www.flcv.com/Ohiosum.html
www.flcv.com/summary.html

Also seen to 2006 in several races: www.flcv.com/eirstss6.html

Plus there has been a huge amount of touch screen switching all over the U.S. in 2004 and 2006, which could also have happened here, but there are no indications that Sarasota voters observed switching between candidates.
Same URLs as above.

[bleever]

8. If Congress has authority over the qualifications of its members, Dems

should decide that this election needs to be done over.

Paging Land Shark!

[SarasotaDem]

9. This might be the clincher ..

Illegal ballot imagine that :)