And it distresses me there isn't more of an uproar over this. Because whenever we DON'T protest such, we embolden the theives to steal ever larger elections.

There's only one fair way to do this. Allow those whose votes were eaten to vote again. And then count those votes by hand.

"If you look for the social economic motive, you will not have to wait for history to tell you what was propaganda and what was truth." - George Seldes

The purported investigation follows a well known technique -- front burner/back burner. Investigate a problem and when... aha!.... the investigation fails to uncover the problem, you conclude -- quite erroneously -- that there was no problem, or, that the voters themselves were the problem. After all, we're all too willing to believe in the stupidity of the voter -- unfortunately.

Logically speaking; not finding the problem is not the same as there being no problem. And the problems were quite obvious, and were reported during the early voting period when the election's outcome was still unknown.

Even more telling, the wife of candidate Vern Buchanan, the declared winner, required three attempts before the machine would register her vote. Mrs. Buchanan was not the only person to have trouble getting the recalcitrant machines to register a vote, as scores of others reported having the same problem. Rather than inadvertently skipping the race, as the theory went, many voters simply couldn't get the machines to record their vote.

It's not exactly clear what the highly partisan "investigation" was supposed to accomplish, other than creating the impression that the problem had been addressed -- a la front burner/back burner. Various studies of this problem have concluded that a successful hacking might leave no trace, and since the investigation was blocked from examining the proprietary computer code, this avenue was blocked in any case.

From the very beginning, there was little pretense that the investigation was anything other than a whitewash. David Drury, who headed the audit, in an obvious conflict of interest since he was also the official who had certified the machines used in the election, immediately pronounced that "there not going to find anything," only to have ~7% of the machines fail in the first day's testing.

Despite the rather overwhelming evidence of machine malfunction, the theory that voters had overlooked the race was used to explain away the evidence. This was necessitated by the fact that early voters who had used  paper ballots had undervoted at a more believable rate of ~2.5%, thus rendering the "they ignored the race" argument nonsensical. Moreover, voters in neighboring counties hadn't made the same error, and again, had undervoted at a more normal rate (~2%, ~5%) If, however, voters had merely passed over the race inadvertently, there was still room to blame the voters rather than the equipment. So, relying on memories of butterfly ballots, the theory that voters had missed the race in their haste was proposed -- particularly straight party line voters, who presumably were cuing on the party affiliation near the name. However, since the affected race is placed at the top of the second page of the ballot, it's hard to see how voters would would robotically overlook a race at that point. You can judge for yourself whether the race was easily missed by looking at a screenshot of the ballot in the following link:

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002079.php

Consistent till the end, the auditing group ignored all the evidence of tampering and/or malfunction and reached an astonishing and patently false conclusion: "the audit team concluded that there is no evidence that suggests the official results are in error." Meanwhile, an independent study commissioned by the state from Florida State University concluded something that had become all too obvious: "There is no dispute that this undervote is abnormal and unexpected and that it cannot be explained solely by intentional undervoting.."

ad bellum purificandum - Kenneth Burke