In this case, recently there was a special election in Broward Country, Florida for a seat in the state legislature. It was the only race on the ballot and all the candidates were Republicans. The winner took the seat by a plurality of 12 votes.
The electronic voting machines used in the election recorded 134 "undervotes" - that is, 134 ballots in which no candidate was chosen in that race. (Remember, there was only one race on the ballot.) Because the election was so close, a winning margin of less that 0.5%, Florida law requires a manual recount of any invalid votes.
But there is literally no way to do that - there is no paper trail. The most election supervisors could do would be to have each machine print out a report, but all that would do is spit out that there were X number of undervotes - that is, repeat what officials already knew. K-9 once described itself as having a "reliability rating of less than zero." "In other words," came the response, "you're worse than useless." The same can be said of these reports.
Runner-up Oliver Parker wondered why, if the machines are to be believed, 134 people would come to a single-issue election and not vote. We'll never know.
My last post on this is here; there are links to earlier posts to be found there.
Unintentional Humor Dept.: Broward County Attorney Ed Dion dismissed the argument that the law requiring a recount applied here,
saying Florida's administrative code says only paper ballots can be counted by hand.
"The way the state has set this up is for only the ballots that you can physically review [by hand]," he said.
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