State Audit of Sarasota Voting System Flawed, Incomplete

[kster]

Friday, February 23, 2007
MEDIA ALERT
CONTACT: David Kochman, 954-703-0245


State Audit of Sarasota Voting System Flawed, Incomplete

Tallahassee, FL – The audit of Sarasota County’s voting system was flawed, incomplete, and provides even more compelling reasons for the Christine Jennings campaign to seek a thorough investigation by outside experts.

The audit contained several critical flaws:

- The investigation was incomplete: Experts were not allowed access to the machines, causing Princeton professor Ed Felton to call the audit “far from the complete, independent study I had initially thought they wanted,” and forcing the team to rely on the flawed parallel testing conducted by the Secretary of State’s office. On page 19 of the final report from FSU’s SAIT lab, the researchers acknowledge “We did not conduct a comprehensive election audit…The team’s task was not to examine the iVotronic systems or the PEBs used in the election, or to perform forensic analysis on those systems to determine whether a problem in them caused the undervote.”

- The audit ignored the analysis of MIT’s Dr. Charles Stewart, who found a strong statistical correlation between the date of machine set-up, number of machines prepared that day, and increased undervote rates

SNIP...“A doctor can’t diagnose a medical problem without examining the patient, so how can you diagnose an election problem without examining the machines?” said Jennings Communications Director David Kochman. “It’s unfortunate that the state’s election officials were more concerned about sweeping the problem under the rug than finding out the truth about what went wrong with Sarasota County’s voting system.”



http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4183#more-4183

[kster]

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http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2743415