Today's Daily Schadenfreude: ES&S

Election Systems & Software, Inc., got some bad news in their attempt to avoid divulging their source code for touchscreen voting machines in Sarasota County.

These are the machines that managed to - oops! - miss some 18,000 votes in the hair's-breadth election for FL-13 between the declared winner, Vern Buchanan (R), and Christine Jennings (D). Well, it appears that there's really no explanation for how 18,000 votes just disappeared, unless it was a computer glitch:

An MIT political science professor who is a specialist on election systems testified Tuesday that it's statistically unlikely that almost 13 percent of Sarasota voters chose not to vote in a congressional race.

A more likely conclusion to explain the unusually high "undervote" is that something went wrong in the preparation of voting machines, the professor, Charles Stewart, told a judge during a hearing over whether Christine Jennings' campaign can obtain access to computer codes used to program the electronic touchscreen voting machines.

State officials have declared Republican Vern Buchanan the winner over Jennings, a Democrat, by fewer than 400 votes out of more than 238,000 cast in the race to replace Rep. Katherine Harris in Congress.

But 12.9 percent of voters in Sarasota County did not record a vote in the race -- far more than the 2 to 6 percent of voters in other counties in the congressional district who appeared to have skipped the Jennings-Buchanan race.

There have been calls for a revote in the race, including one Tuesday by the liberal political group MoveOn.org, which took out a full page advertisement in The New York Times.

The Jennings campaign and 11 Sarasota County voters are asking a judge to require the maker of the voting machines, Election Systems & Software Inc., to divulge the computer "source code" for the touchscreen voting machines used in the county. The code is essentially the programming instructions that tell the computer what to do in a certain situation.

Well, hang on a sec. If it's not a computer glitch, could there be another plausible explanation?

*cough* (vote fraud) *cough*

I'm just sayin' ...

So, ES&S, as you find yourself up a creek without a stylus, this Blast Off! Daily Schadenfreude is for you!