Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[seabass]

>>>officials in Sarasota County say nearly 18,000 votes may never have been recorded<<<


"The official vote count in the battle for -- you won't believe this -- Katherine Harris' seat put Republican Vern Buchanan 369 votes ahead of Democrat Christine Jennings out of just under 238,000 votes cast.

But in Sarasota County, there was an "undervote" of more than 18,000 -- meaning that those voters supposedly didn't choose to record votes in the Buchanan-Jennings race. Jennings carried the county by 53 percent to 47 percent.

The Sarasota undervote in the congressional race amounted to nearly 15 percent. Kendall Coffey, Jennings' lawyer, pointed out that in the other four counties in the district, the undervote ranged from 2.2 percent to 5.3 percent. Put another way, roughly 18,000 of the 21,000 undervotes in the contest came from Sarasota County.

It's hard to believe that Sarasota's voters had a different view of the race from voters everywhere else in the district, considering that the undervote on the county's absentee ballots, cast on paper, was only 2.5 percent. The upshot: Any reasonable statistical analysis suggests that only 3,000 to 5,000 of Sarasota's undervotes were intentional, meaning that 13,000 to 15,000 votes that were actually cast were probably not counted."

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061124/COLUMNIST72/611240699/-1/Help0530