Mistakes made during voting audit

[Freddie Stubbs]

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ORLANDO — Discrepancies in the first round of testing of Sarasota County’s touch-screen voting machines were the result of human error, not problems with the devices, state elections officials said Thursday about the audit in a disputed congressional race.

The testing is in the contest between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings, who trails by a slim difference that she said was caused by machines losing thousands of votes. Tuesday’s test used scripts telling mock voters who to choose, in an attempt to see if the machines accurately record votes.

The test results didn’t match the scripts in five cases in the District 13 congressional race, out of 251 ballots cast. But all five discrepancies were because mock voters didn’t correctly follow the instructions on the scripts, said Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for Florida Secretary of State Sue Cobb.

“It’s exactly as we expected,” she said, adding that the errors were caught in a review of videotape footage of the audit.

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