Something has gone very wrong when Americans report being ashamed to tell relatives living in what were once considered “banana republics” in South America about the Sarasota election.

"I want to get to the bottom of this," voter Linda Crespo, a native of Brazil, told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

"We were in Brazil in September when their election was going on and we left because of all the nastiness in that campaign. Then we come back to this. I tell you, it made me ashamed to tell my family and friends in South America about what is going on here."

In the botched Congressional election in Sarasota FL it was disturbing enough to see a massive undervote deprive approximately 13,000 Americans  of their right to vote.

But things go wrong everywhere; they go wrong all the time. Right? Mistakes can be remedied. Problems can be fixed. A re-vote can be taken.

"Let them eat chad."

What was worse was the cavalier and arrogant attitude with which election officials in both Sarasota County and the office of the Florida Secretary of State shrugged it off.  

Elections Supervisor Kathy Dent's first response had been to criticize the voters. Dent met the genuine outcry of citizens, many of them elderly, in a particularly patronizing way.

"I can't go in and hold their hand in the voting booth," she said. "I did everything humanly possible."

Asked why so many undervotes, Jenny Nash, the state's Division of Elections spokeswoman, shrugged, "You can't really get in the minds of the voter."

Dent dismissed early complaints as partisan sniping, though they had begun during early voting the week before, and only grew louder on Election Day.

"Like deja vu all over again."

Mike Lasche of Sarasota alerted officials of problems with the system after he voted early on Oct. 25. He said the experience "shakes my faith in electronic balloting."

Dr. Richard Malkin said he and his wife voted early and realized their votes in the congressional race weren't recorded just before electronically casting their ballots. So they re-voted. "The lady right next to us had the same problem. So many people said the same thing,'' said Malkin, a Democrat who sits on a SunTrust bank board with Buchanan.

“It's like 2000 all over again."

Some voters wrote e-mails to Dent; some to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Dent's response contained a reference to the group that wanted a paper trail.

"I hope we can stop looking for ways to disrupt the process and disenfranchise voters,” she sniffed.

"Je ne regret rien. Nada.  Niente."

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune described Dent's attitude, rather charitably, as “resolute defiance.”

She insisted her workers ran “a great election” and said she did not know the exact causes of a 18,000-vote difference between the total number of ballots cast in Sarasota and those cast in the 13th race.

She said she had instructed her workers to tell voters the race might be hard to see on the ballot. But Dent completely ignored and not even once addressed the problem voters complained about most: that the machines didn’t register their vote.

As we saw in yesterday’s story, precinct officials said voters biggest complaint didn’t concern the confusing ballot design, but trouble getting the electronic touch screen to register their votes.

The Miami Herald quoted precinct official Leslie Rowland, who said the number of complaints had led her to devise alternative techniques for ballot casting. "I was telling people to use their knuckles," she said.

Clueless like a fox, maybe.

Defying reality, Dent said nothing mechanical went wrong with the county’s $4.7 million touch screen voting machine system. “Could it be that both candidates are from Sarasota — I don’t know,” Dent said. “I don’t have a clue.”

She encouraged voters who had problems to report them to her office, but didn’t know what they would be able to do. “After the fact, there’s not a lot we can do about it . No way this was voter machine malfunction. It was voter error or voter choice."

Then she suggested the massive undervote might be due to voters registering a protest against what became a negative campaign.

“We had a real heated race in the primary and I think it turned people off. I heard from a lot of people that didn't care for either candidate. I personally undervoted in that race.”

A spokeswoman for the Florida Secretary of State’s office—a springboard for two recent Florida Secretary’s of State to cash in by becoming lobbyists for the election companies they only recently regulated—repeated Dent’s suggestion.

"It could be a protest vote. There's a lot of different reasons people undervote. Certainly undervoting is the voter's prerogative."

The Okie-Dokie Doctrine

It was a curious argument. Had the two Congressional candidates been six times nastier to each other in Sarasota County, where the undervote was a massive 13 percent, than in the two other counties comprising Katherine Harris’ beloved 13th Congressional District, both of which had just a 2 percent undervote?

"No, I don't think we know that there is a problem," said Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash.  "After an election, everyone is an expert. I'm not going to speculate … People can't just look at 18,000 votes and say there's a problem."

This of course recalls Dent's comment, quoted here yesterday, that "most of the voters that my poll workers talk to actually said their vote did show up," suggesting that anything over 50% is Okie-Dokie with her.

Once again "Mission Accomplished" spoken too soon

Dent has often sounded more like a saleswoman for Election Systems & Software the company she persuaded Sarasota County to buy $4.8 million of touch screen machines from, than an elected official representing the people.

She was even quoted in an E S & S press release in October 2002, with this pithy headline:

“Election Officials, Poll Workers Throughout U.S. Go Back to School to Prepare For November General Election; New Election Systems & Software iVotronic (TM) Touch Screen Voting Technology Seen by Election Supervisors as Great Way to Vote”

After a lot of blah blah blah, its Dent's moment to shine… "Our primary was wonderful," said Kathy Dent, Supervisor of Elections in Florida's Sarasota County.

After they were installed, Dent absolutely marveled at the county's new labor saving appliance. She even replaced the traditional oval stickers given to voters that say "I voted" with newer, larger decals that state, "I voted touch screen."

“It’s the same as about touching your microwave oven, and then you cast your vote button at the top of the screen, and that's all there is to it. It's a real simple process,” she told a reporter. “The voters of Sarasota absolutely loved the system.”

Here's why you can't trust the Democrats either

On the question of how elections are run in America, the people are way out in front of the politicians.  U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, called Sarasota’s massive undervote  "unfathomable.”

"Now I'm not a conspiracy theorist,” Wexler hastened to add. “But you can't help but mention that the one county that happened to have all the problems was actually the county that supported the Democratic candidate for Congress."

A great many Sarasota voters apparently had no such reservations. "What is this that you shouldn't talk about the possibility of conspiracy theories," Lynn Kalish said.

"A conspiracy of some kind is evident to me. And the only thing that's going to satisfy me is a revote."

Others also believe skullduggery was afoot.

"It is my suspicion that there may be an algorithm in the software which detected voters voting for Davis and Nelson, then skipped the screen for Jennings-Buchanan," Mike Lasche told reporters.

"I think, frankly, that there was a problem with the software," offered John Minder,  a computer engineer. "That seems pretty obvious. Intentional or unintentional, I can't say."

Voters testimony more believable than E S & S shills

Here are some of the comments voters reported in the days immediately after the election, as collected by the Sarasota Herald Tribune, which then made the unfathomable decision that it had been poor ballot design that was the problem.

These voice deserve a national audience.

'I know I hit the button', said Bill Krueger. But when the voting machine had not cast a ballot in the congressional race, he was surprised but not particularly upset.

He and his wife both had to use the review page twice. "Did everyone else have this problem?" the 69-year-old Republican asked. "I never thought the election system was crooked until this one."

Michael Sanderson's wife warned him about the problems voters were having with the congressional race. When the 52-year-old registered Republican tried to tap the box for Christine Jennings, it didn't check. He tried to hit it a couple of more times, and it finally registered.

Yet when he went to the review screen, the Jennings box was not checked. He had to go back and vote for Jennings again.

"I hate this stuff; it should be paper ballots, period," he said. "I know there's hanky-panky."

"This election is not over"

"I'll tell you this," said Cheri Potts, who works for the Sarasota Police Department, "this election is not over."

Joan Nasser voted the second day of early voting. She was careful and checked all the screens, she said, but was warned at the end that she had not voted in the Buchanan-Jennings race.  

"I thought, 'Well, maybe I missed a page,' which struck me as funny because I was careful about what I was doing," said Nasser, 73, and a Democrat.

But the next day she heard people on the radio talking about the same problem. "It seems to me there is definitely something fishy there."

Martin McKee, 71, said he pressed a vote for Jennings twice, and twice his vote didn't register. A third try finally did the trick.

Ruth Barger, 83, was sure she voted for Jennings on Election Day at Longboat Key Town Hall. But when her final review screen came up, she saw that her vote had not registered. She didn't know what to do. If she tried to fix the missing vote, she feared she might lose everything. So she just hit the vote button and walked out.  

"It upset me all day long," she said. "It bothered me to no end."

"I'm 83. I thought maybe I forgot something."

Sharon Wagner, a 61-year-old Sarasota County resident and retired nurse, said that she was shocked to find both the Jennings and Buchanan boxes empty when she reviewed her vote for the first time at the Gulf Gate Library. "I knew that when I went through the first time, I know I voted," said Wagner, a Republican. "I know exactly that I voted for Christine Jennings."

Wagner said she backtracked to the second page, and again put in her vote for Jennings. "This time it took," she said.

Belle Heneberger went to the polls specifically to vote for Jennings. Yet when she reviewed her ballot, it showed she had not endorsed anyone in the congressional race.  "I was completely astonished," she said. "It's not an election I wouldn't have voted on."

Helen Krate arrived at the Gulf Gate Library with a sample ballot in hand. She had marked the sample to help her through the process. Once she reached the final screen to review whom she voted for, Krate noticed she had not cast a ballot in the congressional or state House District 70 races.

"I was a little surprised. I'm 83 years old; maybe I forgot something." Krate said she went back and cast her vote for Jennings and Shapiro.

The Hospital Board Gets Dissed

Arguments about ballot design, machine error, statistical probabilities and the like don't sway Bertie Lou Gentile, one of more than 500 people packing Bayfront Park on Sunday calling for a revote in the 13th Congressional District race. The 77-year-old Nokomis resident has a simple reason for believing that 18,000 people didn't all intentionally skip the congressional race Nov. 7.

"When you get more votes for the hospital board, you know something's wrong," Gentile said.

Ellen Fedder of Longboat Key said she's confident she voted for Jennings correctly the first time. She said she almost hit the "vote" button before her eye caught the review page warning that that no vote had been recorded in that race.  

David Shapiro, a Democratic candidate for state representative, said the same thing happened to him when he voted Friday in Venice. He said he's sure he went through the ballot carefully and was particularly interested in voting for Jennings, whom he had campaigned with. When his review page came up, his vote for Jennings hadn't been recorded, he said.

Thinking the unthinkable…again.

Kathy Dent isn't new to politics. She was appointed to the Sarasota County Republican Executive Committee in 1988, and elected in 1992. She belongs to the Republican Women's Club. She has served as a Republican precinct committeewoman. Dent and her husband, John, were members of the Siesta Key Republican Club.

When first elected in 2000, Dent had no experience with elections before running for the job. Afterwards, she picked for her top assistant a campaign contributor with no elections experience, but who used to work with her husband.

As Election Supervisor, she established a “Vote In Honor of a Vet program,” for which she was accused of using her government job to push the Republican agenda.

In a mailing paid for by the government, her office sent out fliers touting the military experience of an outspoken Republican Party leader in the community who was also an Army veteran, who called for leaders who will value "lower taxes, limited government, a strong national defense, faith in God and equal opportunities for all."

Election officials saw their arrogant behavior as normal; as business as usual. It raised a disturbing question:

“How long has this been going on?”

What most would prefer we all forget is that the answer to this question may well have relevance to the question: How did we get involved in a war in Iraq?

Alan Bandler Of Longboat Key said the same thing happened when he voted in downtown Sarasota. "I asked the poll person, 'Is something wrong here?'" Bandler said. "I voted, and I know I voted and it didn't show up."

Bandler could have speaking for all of us: Is something wrong?  

Something is.

NEXT:   THE RETURN OF GARY GREENHALGH