SARASOTA, Fla. - Elections officials began the tedious process Monday of recounting votes and investigating allegations of voter machine malfunctions in southwest Florida's 13th Congressional District, a race in which the Republican contender leads by a thin margin.

Florida law requires a recount in all five counties in the district. But all eyes are on Sarasota County, where touch-screen voting machines recorded that 18,000 people - 13 percent of voters in the Nov. 7 election - did not cast a vote for either Republican Vern Buchanan or Democrat Christine Jennings. That rate was much higher than surrounding counties in the district.

"I do see some interesting things that are happening in regards to votes that seemed to have disappeared or people didn't vote," said Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher, a member of the state Election Canvassing Commission that ordered the recount. "You don't know if they chose not to vote or whether they didn't, and possibly a paper trail would show more clearly."

Initial tallies give Buchanan a 377 vote lead over Jennings in the race - less than 0.2 percent. Buchanan declared victory last Wednesday, but Jennings has not conceded. Both candidates are in Washington for congressional orientation this week.

A team from Florida's Department of State is observing the recount and preparing for an extensive audit, department spokeswoman Jenny Nash said.

"They are going to look at all areas of the election," Nash said.

The recount is expected to take all week. Officials on Monday began running roughly 22,000 optical scan absentee ballots through machines to separate ballots where people voted for too many or too few candidates. The machine stops each time it hits a questionable ballot.

The recount team is also downloading individual vote tallies from 1,498 electronic voting machines, a process that takes several minutes per machine.

The state audit team won't begin checking machine calibration until Wednesday. And an expected manual recount of the votes won't begin until Thursday.

Final vote tallies must be certified by Saturday, even though the audit could take longer. If the county misses any recount deadline, the tally goes back to election night totals.

Recount officials dismissed concerns raised Monday by observers and the Jennings campaign that not enough of the audit and recount process was visible to the public, citing a tight timeline to get votes counted again. The recount is being conducted in a warehouse and observers are able to watch most - but not all - of the process from a public area.

"We are watching people open black boxes with machines in them," said Susan Pynchon, executive director of the Florida Fair Elections Coalition. "We are not getting totals. We are not witnessing the recount."

Jennings attorney Kendall Coffey renewed his call for outside experts to investigate the Sarasota County machines. But he said the campaign is setting aside some concerns in the interest of getting results from the recount.

"We don't want to see any tasks that keep this from happening on time," Coffey said. "So much is depending on this week ... we're in a race against time."

Sarasota County elections supervisor Kathy Dent said there are still more than 550 military and overseas ballots out. They aren't due until Friday.

Ironically, the race is for the seat held by U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris, who rose to national attention during Florida's 2000 recount that put the governor's brother, George W. Bush, in the White House. Harris, a Republican, was the secretary of state at the time, and ultimately certified Bush the winner.

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