Intellectual Property Law

Kathy Dent, the election director in Sarasota County, Florida, was the target of controversy after the 2006 election when more than 18,000 ballots cast on ES&S touch-screen voting machines in her county showed no vote cast in the 13th congressional district race. The so-called undervote rate in that race was five times what is considered normal and resulted in two lawsuits filed by voters and the defeated candidate, Christine Jennings, who lost the congressional seat by fewer than 400 votes.

Documents that Wired.com obtained through a records request last year showed that voters in 19 precincts reported problems with the machines on Election Day, complaining that they had to press the ES&S screens repeatedly to cast their vote or that even after a machine registered their vote for Jennings on the ballot page, the vote had disappeared by the time they reached the review screen at the end of the ballot. Throughout the day, poll workers called in the complaints to Dent's office, where staff recorded the problems on the forms that Wired.com obtained.

Yet a video has emerged (above), which shows Dent telling an audience of election officials last year at the Pacific Northwest Election Conference that her office received no calls complaining about problems with the machines on Election Day. In the video, Dent says that voters came forward to complain about machines only after the election was over and their candidate had lost, suggesting that their motives were less than pure.

"It was only after the results were in and the 18,000 undervotes were revealed that all of a sudden there were all of these folks that started saying well they couldn't touch the machines . . . and their vote wasn't registering," she says in the video. "But they were all after the fact, and there were no phone calls coming into my office. So it's a little bit of an indication that there may have been some politics involved in this."

Below are some of the complaints called into her office during the election, which contradict Dent's assertion.

• Precinct 18, Precinct 19, Precinct 25, Precinct 25 again, Precinct 98, and Precinct 124.

Also contrary to what Dent says in the video, it wasn't only voters who supported the losing candidate who complained. Among those who expressed problems with a voting machine was the wife of the winning candidate, Vern Buchanan. An affidavit filed after the election by a Buchanan representative disclosed that on Election Day, Sandy Buchanan had to touch her voting machine more than once -- possibly three times -- before it registered a vote for her husband.

And it wasn't only during and after Election Day that voters complained. They had also complained a week before the election, during the early voting period, that machines weren't registering their vote. There is evidence that Dent was aware of these complaints because she was quoted in a news story discussing them. She told a local reporter that after receiving complaints about the machines during early voting, she instructed poll workers to tell voters to carefully check that their vote in the CD-13 race registered on the screen before they cast their ballot.

So why would Dent tell her conference colleagues that voters never complained about machines until after the election was over, when records her office kept during the election clearly belied this? Is it possible that she simply forgot about all the complaint forms that her workers filled out during the election?

It seems unlikely, given that the CD-13 race was the most controversial and scrutinized election that Dent has overseen since being elected Sarasota's election supervisor in November 2000 (she was re-elected unopposed in 2004). Her office also provided numerous copies of the records to activists, the losing candidate and to journalists. In fact she complained during her conference speech about all of the records requests her office had to fulfill after the election.

I called Dent to ask about the discrepancy between what she told colleagues at the conference and what her election records depicted. She didn't respond.

Dent did, however, tell the conference attendees (in the second video below), that as a result of the 2006 controversy, her office will no longer keep any records that can get her into trouble.

"Sarasota county is going paperless. We don't really put anything in writing anymore," she jokes in the video.

When the audience laughs at her remark, however, she adds: "You think I'm kidding."

(The statement begins in the video at around 2:27.)

The video was shot by Virginia Ross of the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition.

See also:

• E-Vote Memo Is a 'Smoking Gun'
• Docs Point to E-Voting Bug in Contested Race
• Dan Rather Investigates Voting Machines -- Uncovers New Surprises about ES&S Touch-Screens
• GAO Wants to Test Controversial Florida Voting Machines
• GAO Report Says Machines Likely Not Responsible for Florida CD-13 Mishap