It's Wednesday morning, and Florida electoral votes still have not declared. Truth be told: voter suppression tactics by Gov. Rick Scott and the Republican legislature accounted for a disgraceful election process in Florida. Why? To minimize the opportunities for President Obama and Democratic candidates. Early voting should have been expanded, not sharply curtailed as Gov. Scott ordered. In my precinct, only one scanner was working with more than a dozen voters filling out ballots all over the room. In hundreds of precincts in Florida's most populous counties, it took voters many hours to reach their ballots. This shouldn't happen in America. Yesterday, we looked like a third world country. These failures were by design, and Gov. Scott will be held accountable by voters.
27 comments:
Put the blame where it belongs: on the incompetent Miami-Dade County elections department. Every other county managed to have a successful election under the same state rules.
Your precinct only had one scanner and you are blaming the governor? LOL!
amen!
Miami dade elections supervisor Townsley Opened up voting for thousands when she opened the office Sunday and Monday for in person absentee ballots. She risked her job by not letting Gimenez know. It's Gimenez who should be held accountable fir shutting down the vote. For having his spokeswoman give wrong info to the public. For not asking Scott to extend early voting to Sunday knowing mid week his citizens were enduring 7 hour waits all week. Giminez owes us an apology and maybe a resignation in shame. But I would settle for an apology today. Show your face Mr. Mayor!
Gimenez: Don't you dare fire Alina Hudak! Her courageous decision to open the elections office gave a vOice and a vote to thousands who would have otherwise been disenfranchised. It also gave courage to thousands of others to endure long lines everywhere to vote no matter the hardship mAde to endure. I saw them- elderly, infirm, young mothers with small children, working poor risking losing pay and even their jobs, for the right to vote. We will not forget!
Took me 6 hours to vote in Country Walk yesterday. At least I got to cast my vote eventually to boot out David Rivera, made it all worth while.
Townsley put her job on the line? LOL! She simply followed the chain of command and made the request to her boss, Alina Hudak, who approved it (without telling Gimenez).
The real question is why Townsley waited until Saturday, the day before, to make her request. Didn't she foresee the long lines before the election? The ballot and the number of early voting days had been set in stone for nearly a year. There were long lines in 2008.
So why the last minute scrambling? Where was the planning? There is simply no excuse for the insufficient number of polling places, machines, and poll workers. Hudak and Townsley should both be fired for incompetence.
i waited in line for 2 1/2 hours to vote in west miami. my boyfriend in boca waited 3 minutes. mayor gimenez needs to clean house here to get rid of the cronies who are screwing up the elections in this county.
Ok with the complaning--how do we fix it?
The fault here lies with Supervisor of Elections Townsley. She obviously did not properly plan for the turnout and did not have enough ballot scanning machines at many precincts. Further examples of poor planning include her decision to open on Sunday yet not have the staff and equipment ready to accommodate the onslaught of people. Those long lines at early voting sites could have been reduced if she had looked at the situation and reallocated personnel to accommodate the demand. It seems like she had a woefully ineffective plan in place yet she was incapable of making the necessary adjustments to improve upon those failures. That's the Supervisor of Elections' job and she failed miserably.
If Gimenez could be fired for the debacle, I would support that. But he was just elected for a 4-year term and can't be fired.
So the best we can do is to fire the political hacks who handle elections. Hudak, Townsley, and Tara Smith should all be fired today.
At minute 2:04 of his victory speech the president promised in regard to the Miami disgrace: "...or waited in line for a very long time. By the way, we have to fix that."
Please, please Mr. President let's get it started today.
From Herald comments:
"The real problem is that our Elections Department is riddled with unqualified patronage hires who came to the department with zero elections experience. They did not go through job interviews or a competitive selection process. That includes Supervisor Penny Townsley, Chief Deputy Supervisor Tara Smith, Deputy Supervisor Christina White, Deputy Supervisor Gary Hartfield, Deputy Supervisor John Mendez, etc., etc. Their patron and the Queen of the Cronies, Deputy Mayor Alina Hudak, has not gone through a job interview or competitive selection process in 30 years."
Convene a grand jury to investigate. Starting with Gimenez on down. TOwnsley didn't shorten the early voting days or eliminate the Sunday voting day. The governor and republican legislature did that to disenfranchise DEMs. In Florida.
Why didnt Gimenez ask the Governor to extend early voting? Monroe made that formal request.
The number of early voting days was adequate. Other counties had no issues. The problem with early voting in Miami-Dade was that there were an insufficient number of sites. Twenty early voting sites for a million voters is not enough. Shame on the county for putting us through this.
This is a simple engineering problem that should have been solved prior to election day.
There were 2,050 ballot machines and 541 polling places for an average of 3.8 machines per polling place.
Assume 1 minute for check-in and 5 minutes to vote and scan for a total of 6 minutes.
Assume that 50% of all votes were cast on election day. There were 851,645 ballots cast at 6 minutes each for a total of 42,582 hours required to process all ballots.
42,582 hours over 2,050 ballot machines is about 20 hours per ballot machine. Since the polls were open for 12 hours, the problem is clear.
There were insufficient numbers of voting machines which were distributed incorrectly throughout the precincts. I know. I voted in Coral Gables and I had NO WAIT. I walked in and immediately voted. The voting load should have been balanced among the precincts.
This analysis is admittedly crude but you get the picture.
Eliminating the Sunday before the election day - souls to the polls day- was done deliberately to suppress the African American vote in particular, which the Republican legislature knew was going to vote overwhelmingly democratic and for Obama. Eliminating a weekend day Hurt working class, too who can't take time off work during weekdays. Get real- Gimenez and the Republican cabal that has run Miami Dade politics worked hand and hand with Scott and company to try to suppress the democratic vote. That is changing. Diaz de la portilla lost yesterday. Rivera lost yesterday. Let's keep cleaning house Next election.
I think that the obvious problem is the amount of amendments, judges, bonds, representatives and the likes.... too many issues, too long of a ballot. There should be a limit placed on the amount of crap one can vote on. Voting felt like taking the SAT. This is the main reason the lines were long, ...people took forever to read and try to understand what the hell they were voting on.
When I woke up this morning and noticed on the US map of blues, and reds, one little yellow area in the whole country and it was Florida,oh, goodness us,I couldn't believe it. How embarrassing! The vote is the essence of our democracy. Republicans played with our right to vote. The county had four years, plenty of tax money from us, and over 33,000 full-time employees to get the job done correctly. As we only come out in mass every four years, you would think they would do everything possible to make our experience a great one. But no, they did everything they could to discourage and torment us . As customers, and the people who pay the bills, we demand respect and honor. Democrats and Republican alike need to put our feet down, get early voting back in place, double and triple the number of early voting sites, and demand a written plan that include staff and machinery by precinct that is widely distributed and commented on, since basic thinking is not applied to the voting process. We also need to demand that some of the 33,000 full-time people whose salaries we pay, should be in the polling places to run the show, and make us feel comfortable. What we have experienced is unacceptable, and we must kick some butt.
Republicans and Democrats are upset with Gimenez, so, based on that, he is clearly doing something right.. Both parties are destroying this nation. We need true independent voices to start rising above the partisan do nothing national parties that control everything, and we wonder why we are in this situation...
Constitutional Amendments, I have one... NO MORE 10 PAGE BALLOTS with 20,000 words....
The other major problem was the time it took Tallahassee to finalize the redistricting.. The County was left with the choice of changing everyone's voting locations (which would have caused extreme voter confusion), or keeping the precint locations as is, and risking inbalance in voter turnout at specific locations... A true NO WIN situation...
There is no County in Florida with nearly as many voters as in Miami-Dade... There is no apples to apples comparison... And I am not aware of any ballot elsewhere that had as many questions and races for voters to consider...
I sat at a Key Biscayne voting location for most of the day.. All 4 precincts vote there... 3 out of the 4 had a very reasonable wait, but, the 4th had a 2-3 hour wait.. Why, because the 4th had more voters (higher density area), and the decision was made to keep everyone at the same location so as not to confuse the voters.. That was case in point.. At my gables voting location, there were 2. One line was 25 minutes, my line had no wait... The precinct allocation was a part of the problem as well...
My solution... Vote AB!!!
Redistricting happens once every ten years. Everyone knows this, so you staff up to get the changes made, the work done, and the precincts drawn up. Please tell me what logic would have 1 person in a precinct, and at the same time have a precinct with over 8,000 people in it?
I wonder if they thought that the ballots would count themselves? Seems to me that ballot counting would be a major operation that would be well planned in advance. Staff, machinery, procedures, and timeframe would be well laid out long before voting of any kind began. Once the polls closed an entirely different team of people should have manned the count and been ready to give the numbers like everybody else by 11o'clock. Nothing makes sense.
So we know that we have to start organizing RIGHT NOW so we can defeat this piece of excrement that we have for governor! I don't know about you people, but I am going to start doing something!
The ballots were loaded up; another suppression tactic. They figured: how many people would read the nonsense. All should hang their heads in shame! This election and the delay were probably part of the plan too. Yes you heard Karl Rove on NATIONAL TV agitating to hold off declaring Ohio. He wanted a repeat of 2000! Thank God Ohio stood up. But Florida and Miami Dade? What is happening here is a NATIONAL DISGRACE and it most certainly is a stain both on Rick Scott AND Carlos Gimenez, the mayor who could have acted like a leader instead of a bleating sheep.
It is two days now. They need to ask for help. Either bring in other employees in the county, or bring in election officials from other counties in the state to count. We need to bring closure.
Sick and shameful to see FL still blacked out on the US election map 24 hrs post-election – like a gangrened limb… useless and pathetic.
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