Dean calls for new election in disputed congressional race
Gainesville.com
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Article published Dec 7, 2006
Dec 7, 2006
Dean calls for new election in disputed congressional race
The Associated Press
Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean called for another election in the disputed District 13 congressional race, saying that the Democratic-controlled Congress should not seat the declared winner, Republican Vern Buchanan, until it is sorted out.
“You cannot seat someone if you don’t have an election that’s valid,” Dean said in a taped interview scheduled to air Sunday on Bay News 9, Tampa Bay’s cable news channel. The St. Petersburg Times reported the comments in its Thursday editions.
The election has been called into question because of 18,000 blank votes - also called undervotes - in Sarasota County the race between Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings in the Nov. 7 election.
Buchanan won by just 369 votes, but Jennings contends the machines didn’t work correctly and that she is the rightful winner. The state is examining the ATM-style voting machines to see if they malfunctioned, but has found no evidence of that so far in its audit.
“There are 18,000 people who may have voted, and we don’t know what happened to their votes. You can bet that if the Republicans were 500 votes short they’d be calling for a new election, and they’d be right,” Dean said.
Jennings appeared Thursday in Sarasota with eight people who said the county’s machines failed to register their votes several times.
Jennings said she will ask the U.S. House to take the extreme measure of conducting its own investigation into the election. She has already sued for a revote and said she was not aware of Dean’s support until she read it in the newspaper.
Dean is advocating a new election to restore voter confidence, but it is not his role to push for congressional intervention, said Democratic National Committee spokesman Luis Miranda.
Buchanan led Jennings by a few hundred votes on Election Day and in subsequent manual recounts. But Jennings is challenging the result because Sarasota County’s undervote rate was much higher than in other counties in the district.
“We feel that Christine Jennings is putting her own interests above those of the 13th District,” Buchanan spokeswoman Sally Tibbetts said. “It’s unfortunate.”
But Jennings said: “If my opponent wants to represent this district, he should … show concern for the voters and not the machines. We still don’t know what went wrong.”
The House plans to swear in Buchanan, along with other new members, on Jan. 4, according to House Administration Committee spokeswoman Salley Collins. The House could unseat him later, if it chose.
A state audit team is beginning a detailed review of Sarasota County election data, Florida Department of State spokesman Sterling Ivey said. Auditors also are comparing the software loaded on the county’s machines with the software certified by state officials before the election.