Funny y'all should mention this. For the last two days I've been hand-counting ballots in Pima County AZ, where a new state law mandates a recount of 2% of the paper ballots (mostly paper optical scan here) so long as at least two political parties agree to get involved. Three parties did, I was one of five Libertarian counters today, there were 11 GOP and 16 Dems.
I handled the paper for two precincts, one apparantly more Democratic, the other slightly more Republican. We had a hotly contested US Senate race and competitive Congressional races.
Yes, there were people who only voted for governor and propositions but they were nowhere near 13%. 3% would be more like it. AZ had about 20 propositions covering a lot of hot topics.
Here's the actual Sarasota vote data:
http://www.srqelections.com/results/gen2006sum.htm
First, this election had a much bigger ballot than has been implied earlier in this thread. Governor, lots of propositions, a good selection of mid-ticket races.
My first glance says that the Democrats have something to complain about. Bigtime.
OK: start by comparing the undervote rates on this Congressional race with other races. It seems damned unlikely to me that the state AG's race would net so much more interest (less undervote) than a US Congressional race.
Ditto the "chief financial officer"...DOUBLE ditto the "commisioner for agriculture" or the various "charter review board" races.
It gets worse. ALL of the statewide "amendments" had less voter disinterest than this congressional race!? Including the least popular, Amendment 1 ("state planning and budget process"...yaaawn!). See also:
http://www.votesmartflorida.org/mx/hm.asp?id=home
Is anybody ready to tell me that these races would attract less attention than the US Congress in THIS year when control of congress is so contested?
Sorry guys. I see some evidence here that the machines were told to throw out votes in this race. Randomly or selectively, I can't tell. But here's the kicker: even if it's random, it still could rig the race.
The candidates are separated by 373 votes across all four counties. In THIS county the Democrat won (supposedly, but let's assume that part is true).
The ratio is 58:65 (GOP/DEM). There are 18,382 undervotes. There were less than 2,000 undervotes in other upticket races so...let's say the real undervotes is 2,382, leaving us with a nice round number of 16,000 "thrown out votes". I'm being conservative here, I think. On that 58:65 split, of 16,000 the GOPer gets...hmmm...it's a hairy math problem, isn't it? How many of the 16,000 should the Democrat have over the Republican? I'm embarassed to say that I'm not quite sure how to diddle my calculator in exactly that fashion
. Sigh. Somebody will come along in a sec and fill that in.
My point is, if the difference is more than 373 votes, and my gut says it is, then...the election was probably stolen.
Next step, we need to see if undervotes on a precinct-by-precinct basis happened more often in Democratic areas. That can be judged by how each precinct voted in other races...we'll need the "statement of votes cast" (the precinct detail report) to sort that out. See, even if I'm wrong and a 58:65 split of 16,000ish doesn't net a Dem win, it still could if the undervotes were rigged across geographic lines where the voting base for each party is well understood.