But I guess it wasn't to be. As the count now stands, Jennings lost to Buchanan by 368 votes. That's not the interesing number, though, The interesting number is 18,000, or the number of people who voted on everything else in this race, but strangely chose no one in the Buchanan-Jennings race.
I do know what happened...There were stories here from earlier in the day that some people were having trouble getting their votes to register in this race. Anecdotes were surfacing that no selection was showing up on the summary screen. Now we've been using electronic voting machines for three cycles now, and I've never seen any problems with them here. Still, I wanted to keep an eye on this.
My wife and I bundled up our 5 month old in patriatic garb, and we all drove down our polling place at around 6:30pm. The polls closed at 7pm, and it was very busy. Still, it only took about 10 minutes to get to the machine after we got there.
When I went to vote, something odd happened. The Jennings-Buchanan screen never came up. It went Senate (Nelson-Harris) > Governor (Crist-Davis) > Sec of State > State CFO > 5 supreme court judges > one circuit court judge > 5 county charter board races > and then the 6 or 7 amendments. No Congressional race screen.
When the summary screen appeared, it was obvious that I hadn't selected between Jennings and Buchanan. They were listed with no selection made. So I went back in and made a selection. That registered correctly.
I sometimes write software help systems for a living, and I know that one of the hardest bugs to find in such an environment is the missing screen. The human brain often just doesn't register that something was NOT there. Especially if you're seeing a long list of items that you vaguely know, as most voters know the people and issues on a ballot. But I've done this kind of error checking for years, and I was paying attention. That screen never came up.
I asked my wife afterward if she had had the same problem. No. She clearly remembers voting for Jennings, and the summary screen was correct. I know I should have raised a stink about this at the time, but for whatever reason, I didn't. I guess I thought maybe I had imagined it.
But then we talked to my wife's parents. They live about 2 miles away and vote in an adjacent precinct. Her father had no problem voting for the Congressional race. Her mother never saw the screen, and realized after leaving the polling location that she hadn't made that selection.
Today, we see that, district-wide, we have 18,000 undervotes. Kathy Dent, the supervisor of elections, a Republican, came on the TV and said "Well, if people had problems, they should have said something at the voting location. I can't do anything about it now." When asked about the large undervote, she suggested it was not a problem, since she herself had been upset by all the negative ads and had not voted in that race.
That argument is crap. Some, but not all, of the machines in the FL-13 district were not programmed correctly. My mother-in-law, who would have voted for Jennings, did not have her vote registered because she missed the empty box on the summary screen. I'm sure a lot of people did that.
Now whether or not this would have swung the election to Jennings is beside the point. If the excess undervotes were in predominantly Democratic precincts, then yes, there is the possibility of tampering. I wouldn't put it past Buchanan's people to try. But for the most part, I've had no reason to distrust Kathy Dent. The elections here have normally been run like clockwork. But this time they screwed up in a major way. I guess I did, too. I should have reported it at the polls. I didn't. No excuses. I just won't let that happen again.