This is going to be brief, but I posted in an open thread and Ausoleil (who had a great Reclisted Diary today about our Governor) suggested I diary it, and having done some more research, I think I need to, if only so someone can reassure me. I have reason to believe that my County Supervisor of Elections Office did not properly process my Absentee ballot, and other Absentee and Early Votes from a couple of friends.
Follow me below the fold for more, please.
To document my process so others can try it for themselves, I started out reading on 538 about record turnout in LA, GA, etc... It got me wondering where they get that data on early voting. This took me to Nate's source: the United States Election Project. It's apparently an effort affiliated with George Mason University. Their Florida link took me to the Florida Division of Elections page, and halfway down that page is a link to "County Absentee and Early Voting Reports."
Here's where it gets sort of complicated. You first have to check the Election Numbers to find out what the 2008 General Election code is. It's 9250. I then scrolled down to the 9250 "Early Voters" report for my county. (The larger of the 2, it contains names, the one on the right is a summary.) I downloaded and opened the file, which took a minute because it's a 1.4 Meg .txt file, pretty big. But once it opened, it was (allegedly) all the names of early voters in my county as of about 3 AM on 10/28. Indeed, I recognized some names and can confirm they belong to actual people. (My work involves a large database of mostly local people, and I know a lot of their names.)
My name was not on that list. I mailed my absentee ballot in on the 11th, ages ago. There's no reason it shouldn't have been processed by now. My fiancees' name wasn't on there, either, though she just sent hers last Friday, so it's possible there is a time issue there. I also checked two friends' status, one who early voted, and one Absentee. The one who voted absentee was there, but not the other. I should also note that two of the people involved are registered Republicans, (but voting Obama!) so that doesn't appear to have an impact.
I don't know any other names offhand of people in my County who have early voted for sure, so I can't check any others presently. What I'd like is for fellow Florida Kossacks to follow this process for their own counties and do a check for your name and others who have early voted. If anyone has any insight into how this process works, or why there might be a delay, please tell me in the comments. If this is a widespread issue, we MUST start combating it now. You should be able to open the document on any computer regardless of format, and I think Ctrl+F will open a dialog you can use to search it for a string of text (your name) on Mac, for sure on Windows and Linux.
Please take a minute to check this out, and report back. My initial reason for looking into this was the thought that I might be able to reassure people that their vote was counted if they early vote. Now I need some reassurance. Please let me know what you think I should do in the comments.
EDIT: I'm not really concerned with MY vote, since I'll be sure to get that sorted out. I want to make sure everybody elses' vote is counted, too!
EDIT 2: Like I said, my primary concern is that this was a random sample of 4 voters, 2 absentee and 2 Early, and only one vote counted among them. If this is a widespread issue, we need to do something. What would be really helpful is if anyone in FL reading this could PLEASE try to replicate the process, and see what you find. I'm going to repeat tomorrow after emailing some friends in other Counties and see what I come up with. At the very least, this represents 75% of my (admittedly tiny) sample being underreported. That sounds pretty bad to me.
EDIT 3: Commenter mlbflalaw sheds some light: Apparently absentee ballots are not to be tallied until a later date; either Nov 1 or tomorrow, according to someone else. Not yet, anyhow. Perhaps the name I confirmed and thought was an AB was in fact a EV. I'll have to call him tomorrow and double-check. Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I've gotta go to sleep, but I think you've solved this mystery for me!