Florida Division of Elections officials plan to announce today the results of Friday’s 2nd round of electronic voting machine testing in Sarasota County.

They ran limited, mock elections last week on two batches of the touch screen voting machines as part of a state audit.

It comes after 18-thousand digital ballots showed no vote in the highly contested congressional race there between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings.

The first of 2 tests last Tuesday failed to match up with expected results. Elections Division spokesman Sterling Ivey says that’s because staffers failed to execute the test correctly.

“No matter how well designed a test like this is it cannot go back and re-create conditions and it’s highly unlikely to turn up the actual cause that led to 18-thousand undervotes”

Ivey says they’d used scripts to recreate what Sarasota voters did on Election Day. Lowell Finley with the advocacy group Voter Action calls the state’s testing process ‘flawed’.

“It was simply voter input error. The person casting the ballot hit the wrong button or did not go back and unselect the race as required by the script.”

Vern Buchanan has already been declared the winner in the 13th Congressional District. But Jennings is contesting those results.

Election officials say they’ll release the results of last week’s audit tomorrow.