Florida-13 Update: House Committee Launching Investigation of Voting Machine Anomaly

Phil Davis for AP reports: A House task force will take the first steps Tuesday in an investigation of a Florida congressional election decided by 369 votes amid complaints that voting machines failed to count thousands of electronic ballots. (…) The House, which has final authority over its membership, typically waits until legal challenges are completed before taking action. But Florida Democrats last month asked the House Administration Committee to begin reviewing the election after reports of an anomaly in the touch-screen voting machines that recorded about 18,000 skipped votes in Sarasota County. Committee Chairwoman Juanita Millender-McDonald, D-Calif., created the three-member task force to investigate the issue and report back to the full committee. (…) News reports last month revealed that voting machine manufacturer Elections Systems & Software informed state and local election officials of the machine's slow response times nearly three months before the November election. Kochman said the company's memo is significant because it shows there were problems with the iVotronic machines that were not disclosed to the public or Jennings' lawyers, although they had requested all correspondence about issues with the machines. (…) Jennings and several voter advocacy groups have appealed a circuit judge's decision not to allow them access to ES&S source code, which the company says is proprietary. A decision on those cases is still pending.