Sunday, January 07, 2007

Judge rules in favour of election secrecy

A Florida judge has ruled that a Democrat running for Congress has no right to inspect the secret source code of electronic voting machines involved in an extremely close and controversial election.

Republican Vern Buchanan won the election back in November by a mere 369 votes. But around 18,000 electronic ballots (about 15% of the total) showed no vote at all, an unusually high rate of undervoting.

Circuit Judge William Gary rejected as "conjecture" expert testimony that such a high level of undervoting was evidence that votes had been lost, and refused to allow Democrat Christine Jennings to inspect the source code.

Are we surprised yet?

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