US: The touch screen has now joined hanging chads and butterfly ballots in Florida's election scandal lore. Voters in the 13th congressional district were asked to cast ballots on November 7th in several contests at once, but 21,000 of those who voted appear not to have cast their preferences in the district representative contest to replace Republican representative Katherine Harris.
The result has been accusations of voting machine malfunction and demands for a rerun of what voter advocacy groups call a massively flawed election.
The latest chapter in this US state's infamous history of electoral irregularities has rekindled the partisan confrontations that followed the 2000 presidential vote in Florida.
Ms Harris, then secretary of state, certified that election for George W Bush over Al Gore, despite unresolved disputes about the intentions of tens of thousands of voters.
This year's "undervotes" occurred most notably in the 13th district's Sarasota county, where Democrat Christine Jennings enjoyed her strongest support over Republican candidate Vern Buchanan. Eighteen per cent, or almost 1 in 5 ballots, lacked a choice in the race, which Mr Buchanan has claimed by 400 votes, but the undervote was about eight times larger than in other counties and previous elections.
Suspicions about the electronic voting machines were fuelled by reports from hundreds of voters who checked their ballot summary after voting and found no choice was registered in the House race. Republicans and election administrators attribute the number of voters skipping the 13th District race to an ugly campaign that turned off voters.
"Machines don't make mistakes," insisted Sarasota County election supervisor Kathy Dent.
She said the results had been confirmed in a machine recount and that she was "not anticipating that the results are going to change" in a manual recount expected to run through the end of the week.
Critics of the electronic voting systems complain those retabulations will simply duplicate the contested results - if the votes were never recorded, they won't be there to be recounted. - (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)