An urgent plea to the rest of you states out there! Please make sure Florida's 27 electoral college votes aren't needed this year. Because it's looking more and more like we're going to have trouble counting the votes again down here!
Last year the Florida legislature outlawed the infamous touch screen voting systems and several counties have been forced to switch to an optical scan paper ballot system (this was the carrot that was dangled by the legislature to also move our primary date, but I digress....) This change has impacted some of Florida's largest counties, including Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.
Our August 26 primaries will be the first test of these new systems (yes, the same legislation also moved our primaries to coincide with the start of the Democratic National Convention - which is why I couldn't be a delegate this year - but I digress again....).
And we've already blown up the system I'm afraid....follow me after the break.
A special West Palm Beach City commission race last week was to be the perfect testing of the new system. Around 4,000 votes were cast and everything seemed to go smoothly.
Until a couple of days later when 707 additional votes were discovered. The good news - a computerized audit signaled a problem. The bad news - the Supervisor of Elections response seems to be, "don't worry about the results we report on election night. They aren't that important. We'll get it right eventually."
Link to the full story is here.
The other problem facing us in November is the large number of consititutional initiatives that have been placed on the ballot, many by a special commission that was filled with Jeb Bush cronies who left us a very wonderful farewell present...including trying to overturn the constitutional prohibition against providing state money to religious groups and allowing school vouchers....but I digress....
We are being warned that the paper ballots for the November election are likely to be at least 4 or 5 double-sided legal sized pages, adding another whole new wrinkle to the ability to cast our ballots cleanly and quickly.
Stay tuned...it could be entertaining (if you like HBO specials) down here in Florida again.
But please, don't make it important that we wait for these results this time.