FL-13: Jennings Loses Appeal

From the AP:

A state appellate court ruled Monday that Christine Jennings has no right to examine the programming source code that runs the electronic voting machines she says malfunctioned in her southwest Florida congressional race.

The three-judge panel said Monday Jennings did not meet the “extraordinary burden” of proving a lower court was wrong to deny her request last December.

Jennings already had shifted focus to a congressional task force assigned to sort out her election dispute with Republican Vern Buchanan, the state-certified winner of the race by only 369 votes. A spokesman said she has no immediate plans to appeal Monday’s ruling.

Don’t worry, sports fans – this is hardly the end of the game:

“I think the only important activity right now is what is going on in Congress, since they have the ultimate authority in this matter,” Jennings’ spokesman David Kochman said. “They are also moving quicker than the court ever has. In terms of access to the source code and machines, the task force made it clear last week that won’t be a hurdle. They have subpoena power.”

Exactly right. What has taken the glacial Florida courts half a year to decide not to do, Congress can (and likely will) do in an afternoon. While it would have been nice if the courts, rather than Congress, wound up granting access to the ES&S source code, Republicans would have cried “politics” no matter what. And like the spokesman says, now that the legal proceedings are essentially moot, things can move a lot faster.

This has the potential to be really fascinating – our first-ever true window into the “black box” of voting machine source code. Congress’s experts will be able to look at the actual guts of what animates ES&S’s electronic ballot boxes. Even if the eventual findings don’t prove favorable to Jennings’ specific case, we’ll have a chance to know once and for all whether the voting machine companies’ claims that their products are secure and accurate are for real.