And you thought they were busy with the Chads. I went to the elections department in Doral to vote. Wow! Are they busy. They have to validate thousands upon thousands of signatures for four citizen petitions: The cutoff date is February 1. They are in the middle of early voting and have an election in a few days. When you walk in, the receptionist has a pile of petitions on her desk. In fact, most people working at elections have petitions at their desk. I saw them everywhere. Marco Rubio’s delegation came in with a shit-load of boxes filled with his property tax petition — They held a press conference and I was hopelessly trapped by his entourage. Didn’t actually see him, wanted to keep my breakfast down. Luckily the press conference was short. Jose Cancella was there — suck up.
I don’t see how they can finish validating petitions by the February 1st deadline. However, only two of the four petitions really need to be counted because two have no chance to get on the 2008 ballot. The February 1st deadline is for 2008 only. The Florida Hometown Democracy Petition is closing in on the 618,000 they need to get on the ballot. While I was there, I was told they had 12,000 HTD yet uncounted, and that was last week. But to gum it up, Rubio and the Chamber of Commerce keep dragging in boxes of their petitions. It would make sense to count the petitions almost at the critical number first, wouldn't you think? But "sense" is seldom part of decisions made in Florida.I was granted a tour and people, you all have to see this place! It is a giant warehouse. And all the way tucked in the back of the warehouse were people at about 12 desks. Can you guess? Yep, they were validating petitions. They will be doing this seven days a week, minus two days for the election.
(Photos: At top: Beats me, I wasn't listening that well. I think they are the lock boxes for each precinct used to store absentee ballots that were counted or have to be counted. At bottom is the sorter for absentee ballots.)
9 comments:
Correct me if i am wrong:
Aren't two of the petitions just gathering signatures to get the review of the ballot? That is preliminary and not critical.
One way to be sure that Florida Hometown Democracy does not qualify, if for the limited personnel to be absorbed in counting ballots for referendum that have no chance of making it. A different twist on stuffing elections.
They'll get it done one thing Elections does well is Overtime.
The people at elections are good folks. They do a lot with the resources available.
Sort of a sad statement that there needs to be such a high tech machine for sorting absentee ballots. I wish they were harder to obtain and less a tool of over aggresive campaigns. Im all for the right of people to vote and wish more people did, but i hate the practices we have made available through liberal absenteeism.
Show up and vote!
The Elections office doesn't have to verify each petition. It can take a random sample, verify those, and apply the percentage of valid petitions to the whole group. The Elections office is doing this, right?
I'm pretty sure those boxes in the top photo - which used to be used for collecting punch-card ballots - are now used to store all the equipment that goes out to each polling place: a phone, voting slips, etc.
They look at every single one. No sampling.
"We continue to work every day overtime, and we continue to work every weekend," Sola said. "There is no other supervisor of elections office in this state that has 500 employees. We have allocated enough resources."
There are lots of unemployed people out there who could be trained and brought in on a temp basis to help. Why go for the most expensive route, overtime?
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