Democrat Christine Jennings, the Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the 13th Congressional District, won’t concede anything – including, it would seem, being a poor sport. She lost her House race to Vern Buchanan – by about 400 votes – and that was confirmed by manual and machine recounts. Now she’s suing everybody but Katherine Harris.
There’s that matter of the 18,000 “undervote” in Sarasota County.
However it happened, it’s not worth a re-vote. The undervote, however substantial, is part of the process. Lamentably so.
It likely happened for one of two reasons:
1) The Sarasota Herald-Tribune surveyed election workers and found that one in five said voters complained they did not notice the congressional race. A presumed design flaw was at fault, although 87 per cent of the voters managed to figure it out.
2) Approximately one in eight voters said, in effect, “I’m disgusted with this particularly nasty exercise in mudslinging and insulting attack ads, and this is the only way to formally express ‘neither one.'”