Florida Election Challenge

After the House Speaker is sworn in Thursday, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ-12) plans to contest the results of the House election in Florida 13, where election officials declared Republican Vern Buchanan the winner over Democrat Christine Jennings despite allegations of 18,000 missing votes. Holt said, "According to independent experts and the voting machine manufacturer, the results would have been different had all votes been counted."

Buchanan will be seated, but "[t]here will be an asterisk after Mr. Buchanan's name until the case is resolved." The House will seat 233 Democrats and 202 Republicans, although three Republican elections are being contested (one in Louisana, on residency, and another in Florida, on voting equipment).

The Jennings case may get a boost from the fact that the lab that tests most of the country's electronic voting equipment "has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests," according to the NY Times.

In a prepared statement, Holt explained:

Christine Jennings has duly filed a legitimate contest to the certification of the election results of Florida-13. Ms. Jennings raises serious issues, and I think, compelling evidence. According to Ms. Jennings, the number of votes in question is 50 times greater that the number of votes representing the margin of victory...

The House should do nothing to compromise or prejudice the case Ms. Jennings has before the Florida courts. I expect the evidence will show that the certification did not reflect the will of the voters and a re-vote is necessary.

The Palm Beach Post reminds us that the issues are larger than this election:

There's a bigger issue at work than who should be seated in District 13. Democrats in Congress, led by Robert Wexler of Delray Beach, want to require that printers provide a verifiable paper trail. Others argue for eliminating touch-screen machines entirely. With Judge Gary's ruling to keep the source code secret, ES&S may have won for the moment, but the company is losing the bigger and more important battle to reassure an already skeptical public that its product works right, all of the time.

Holt serves on the Committee on Education and the Workforce and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and is on temporary leave from the House Committee on Resources.

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