Photo: @smokey545/Daily Kos
Voting in Broward County, Florida.
They're still counting ballots in south Florida. Miami-Dade just finished. Duval, Palm Beach and Broward counties are still going. They're also trying to account for the hours voter spent waiting in order to cast a ballot. From the Miami Herald:
But Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes defended the work of her office as employees continued to process absentee ballots Wednesday.
"All of us who watch elections know when voters are interested in candidates and issues, we are going to have long lines," Snipes said.
As best I can tell, the Broward elections supervisor believes that long lines are the inevitable result of voters caring about an election -- in which case, I ask, why try to make the lines shorter? If you can't fix it, why try?
For those wishing to look closely at the problem, the Herald gets quite granular, as does Talking Points Memo. ADDING: former Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio says she is "getting to work" on election reform, by which she seems to mean change.
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Screw Kansas; what's the matter with Florida? They've bungled every national election since I've been old enough to vote. We know this is a pattern; how does it keep happening? Are there no Dem organizers on the ground?
Oregon has voted by mail for years and it is great. You get the ballot and the voters pamphlet weeks before the election and you can make your choices in your own home when it is convenient for you. I don't know why more states don't vote by mail.
I can't imagine waiting in line for hours to vote anymore.
Yes in Oregon ALL ballots are mailed out to voters 3-4 weeks ahead, and then we can take time filling them out, and hand carry to a ballot box in local library, or mail back in. NO LINES! So Simple!
Also from Oregon. So simple. If you don't want to pay for a stamp, just take your sealed ballot to one of MANY drop off points in the your area. You have about 3 weeks to accomplish this. NO problems. No lines, no waiting, no weather excuses, no voter intimidation. Just VOTE!
I live in Los Angeles. We have plenty of voting precincts and machines available. California has thousands of polling precincts, each serving maybe 200 people or
so. Lines at the end of the day are long, but nothing to compare when looking at
Ohio or Florida or other states.
How do we do it? We have polls set up everywhere (and I mean everywhere):
-wedding chapel
-garage of lifeguard headquarters
-private home
-garage
-school auditorium
-Krishna temple
-union office
-police museum
-Cetacean Society building
-fire station
-Columbarium
-party supply store
-Echo Park indoor pool
-laundromat
My point is that Los Angeles facilitates the voting process, bringing it as close to the place where people live as possible, making the precincts small enough to be manageable.
It's not that hard to do.
All the above are good ideas and just plain common sense, which the teapubs also lack, but what about the voter purges they do less than six months before an election? What about the people requesting and voting by absentee ballot when they are told their ballot doesn't count because they have been purged or the mailing address is wrong/has changed and the window of opportunity to correct it has closed? (And how did they get the ballot in the first place if the address was wrong?)
And then the ID. You want ID, fine. Make it the same nationally and have a window of more than a major election year to give everyone the time they may need to request/get the papers they need to get the ID in the first place. Not everyone was born in a hospital and not everyone was born when the county seat was notified of a birth. Back then if the places where your records were kept burned or got flooded, goodbye records. (I imagine these people today would be shocked to know we actually had to use our brains and couldn't use calculators or computers in school because we went to school in bc. Before computers.)
I don't know where these teapubs come up with the idea everyone needs ID to cash a check from to argue for IDs. I call the power company, tell them where I'm moving to, they send me a bill, I send them a check and they never ask me for ID. Same with the phone company, the fuel company, the water dept, taxes, etc. I've never had to show ID to any of them and they all accept my checks. We don't live in a society where we have to show ID to do everyday things.....yet.
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The voting acts right of 1965 is a fine read. Congress amended this section in 1982, prohibiting any voting practice or procedure that has a discriminatory result.
Why we are not upholding the laws and regs already set into place I have no ideal?
The write clearly states, you cannot cheat the votes. And that is what republicans are doing. . . cheating the voters out of being able to vote.
After this many problems in Florida that should tell you something is wrong there. To blame the voters is absurd. Some government officials seem to think that if you tighten the voting days and hours you will change the outcome. Instead of just allowing the candidates to bring out their voters on the issues. There are plenty of states they could use to model themselves after their state government needs to get this fixed before the next election so we are not waiting on one state. Could you imagine if the election was up to Florida this time around? We would still be waiting to find out who was President!
Maybe the elections officials were all wondering who would play them in "Recount 2."
I'm just delighted that it didn't come down to my disfunctional state again.
There is no reason for Florida holding up the results. California and other large populated states were finished in under 12 hours. Florida is just stalling. Obama won, and they are not happy it. Obama won there too, they just do not want to admit it.
No. Obama won and we are quite happy about it. We came close to crashing the system in order to vote, but vote we did. For President Obama.
I saw a guy from OH on Maddow talk about how Ohio has had lines in the past, nothing to see here. Which raises the question: if people are waiting in lines, why didn't you extend early voting rather than shrinking it?
Unless you wanted longer lines, that is.
I live in Broward County and watched the election unfurl. The resources were just barely able to keep up with the demand, if nothing and no one went wrong. In a process this complex it is inevitable that something and someone will go wrong. Brenda Snipes background is in education and her training was in educational administration. In short, she knows how to run a public school without breaking any laws. Her background may well have suited her when she was an administrator, but she is out of her depth as an executive. Had it rained, had the already lax training for poll workers been even slightly laxer, had veteran poll workers not returned, had any one of these elements taken place it would have been a shambles. That said, there is still more blame to go around. The Florida legislature added eleven constitutional amendments to the ballot. The voters were not interested in most of them and, when they did not vote on them, the ballots were initially blocked by the ballot box scanners. They'd stop accepting the ballot and ask whether the voter wanted to cast a ballot with a missing vote and the voter would then have to agree that there was a missing vote and that they did not want to vote for an item, then they'd have to accept their decision not to remark the ballot. The number of absentee ballots that were cast rose to record heights on the last couple of days of voting as people cast them in person at the SOE office. Each of these ballots (which arrive with no registration check) have to be examined by humans who will then decide if the signature on the cover of the ballot matches the signature on the original registration. In effect, the voting process is headed by amateurs and run by amateurs. The process needs to be standardized across the country and the people who run the process need to be certified as competent by a commission independent from state and local politics.
How about we require two things of our elections officials:
1) They must be NON-PARTISAN (this would apply to Secretaries of State, for example)
2) They MAY NOT work for ANY campaign, regardless of whether that campaign is for an issue or a candidate (eliminating such conflicts of interest as that presented by Katherine Harris in the 2000 election -- serving as Secretary of State AND as a State Campaign Leader for George W. Bush).
How much do you think these replacement volunteer non'amateur', professional 'certified' election agents should be paid, and from what budget, and regulated and certified by whom, and policed by whom and accountable to whom?
oregon and washington state vote by mail no line.
Pains me to say so Rachel, but Dr. Snipes is correct, she speaks the plain truth, folks do come out to vote more when they're fired up about issues. The 8 hr wait in the heat was entirely due to Voldemort Scott's voter suppression laws reducing early voting from 14 to 8 days. So in the name of love, PLEASE apologize to Dr. Brenda Snipe, Supervisor of Elections Broward County, she's done a difficult job successfully for many elections. One of the worst things to occur down here in SoFlo was Fox noise employees calling the police to prevent bottled water being given to the voters in line. They called it 'electioneering'.
While I am well aware that my home state of Illinois is often the butt of jokes about corruption in politics, but we do not have the kind of nonsensical ballots or ballot procedures that the idiots in Florida seem to be saddled with. We have highly partisan Republican and Democratic poll judges and county clerks, yet we get our ballots counted on time and without a huge amount of fuss.
Occasionally, we do have electoral contests that differ by at most a few hundred votes but we do not take umpteen many weeks counting all the ballots.
Come to Illinois, indeed come to Springfield, the state capital, and see how an allegedly politically corrupt state effectively handles the voting process.
What we need is a complete overhaul of the voting system and bring it to the national level with the states having no responsibility other than to set up and supervise the election process. There should be a mandatory 1 month of early voting to help suppress the lines, there should be a national group that is responsible for the registering of voters, we should be able to register and vote the same day, there should be voting precincts that are set up to handle the number of voters that vote in that precinct if the precinct can handle 10 voters then set ti up so that they get no more than that, There should be a process for the voters that haven't studied and know how they are voting on the additional amendments should have a holding area to study the amendments and when they are ready they get priority to the booth to place their vote. Just a few ideas, I'm just sayin.