Florida 13, as the congressional district along Florida's central gulf coast is designated, does not yet have a new congressperson.

For the open seat ironically vacated by Katherine Harris, Republican Vern Buchanan continues to lead Democrat Christine Jennings by roughly 400 votes after a computer-generated recount, which will be followed by a manual recount and a state-run "audit" of voting machines.  Some provisional and military absentee ballots have not yet been counted, but will most likely add fractionally to Buchanan's lead.

Florida 13 incorporates Sarasota, DeSoto and Hardee counties, as well as most of Manatee and some of Charlotte counties.

The issue is 18,000 "undervotes" in the congressional race in Sarasota County.  That is, for those who have blocked such arcane election vernacular from their minds, 18,000 people who voted, but did not register votes for either candidate in the congressional race.

The 18,000 undervotes represent 13 percent of the total Sarasota County votes cast, exceptionally high for such a race by any measure.  They are also absolutely critical to any Jennings challenge, since Sarasota was the only county she carried, with 53 percent of the tabulated vote.  Undervotes for the congressional race in the other four counties in the district were less than 5 percent of the vote totals.

While Jennings is matching her squeals with the usual battery of lawyers, led by Kendall Coffey, there is no serious indication of corruption or partisanship in the voting procedures.

The Buchanan/Jennings match-up was one of the nastiest in the country, and also the single most expensive, with more than $8 million raised, much of that from Buchanan's considerable personal wealth.  An entrepreneur with varied holdings, Buchanan was attacked from his primary race forward for controversial business dealings.  Jennings, a former banker, was incessantly (and correctly) hammered as a lockstep liberal.

While voter complaints in the district seemed about average until the congressional race was identified as a squeaker, Jennings supporters in Sarasota emerged within days with stories of problems encountered with touchscreen computer voting machines, the iVotronic, one of those that do not provide a paper trail for reconciliation of controversies.

Most complaints have centered on alleged difficulties in getting the machines to register the voter's choice for the race, fueling speculation that many voters simply did not notice the screen prompt indicating that they had left the race blank.  The other prominent speculation is that the race itself had been so nasty that an extraordinarily large group of voters was registering disapproval of both candidates by voting for neither.

As experts parachuted in to proffer their expertise, a new theory emerged. 

Charlotte County used the same voting machines, with only a typical undervote in the congressional race.  But Charlotte County had a large undervote in the attorney general's race.  Sarasota County had an average undervote in the attorney general's race.

This caused analysts to contrast how races were displayed on the screens in the two areas.  As it turns out, in Sarasota County, the congressional race was paired on a screen below the six-candidate governor's race.  Charlotte County paired the governor's race with the attorney general's race, providing a separate screen for the congressional race.

With all the attention on ballot design, there is now also criticism of the way Sarasota County used color on the screen to delineate races, with some arguing that the color layout used drew voter attention away from the congressional race.

Sarasota County's Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent is not buying the ballot design argument, perhaps desperately wishing not to become the Teresa LaPore of 2006 (LaPore was blamed for the infamous Palm Beach County butterfly ballot of 2000, although many others had signed off on it).

Still, Dent is undoubtedly correct that there is not one overall reason for the undervote, as large as it is.  The expert speculation, while informed, is still speculation, and investigators are likely to find numerous comparable touchscreen ballot displays around the country that did not result in such controversy.

As experts parachuted into Sarasota County, so did the usual bevy of election reform activists, advocates and editorialists, many displaying their ignorance of the actual circumstances simply to peddle their causes, adding not at all to a rational conclusion.

Regardless of the millions upon millions of dollars that have been spent to "reform" voting procedures, particularly in Florida, close races anywhere in the country amplify ongoing problems, and despite best efforts and good intentions, there may be no way, ever, to eliminate human voter error.

Short of an unexpected Jennings concession, it is not likely that Florida 13's congressional race will be resolved without litigation, and Jennings faces an uphill battle there, courts being correctly reluctant to decide such matters on the basis of dueling theories.  Even so, the noise will get a lot louder before it subsides.