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Florida's GOP Lawmakers Blamed For Early-Voting Lines
Saying early voting cost too much money with rules that weren't uniform, Republican legislators led a charge three years ago to set new statewide standards limiting the number of polling sites and their hours of operation.
Long lines have confronted Floridians trying to vote early. This one snaked outside a library in Orlando on Monday. (McClatchy) Those revamped rules trimmed early voting from 12 hours per workday to eight.
During the first presidential election since Gov. Jeb Bush signed the bill in 2005, the new law's impact can be seen throughout South Florida: exhausting lines at polling sites in Miami-Dade and Broward that led voters to miss work, senior citizens to beg for chairs and voting advocates to question whether some are being disenfranchised.
From Miami City Hall to the Southwest Regional Library in Pembroke Pines, voters on Monday and Tuesday -- the first two days of early voting -- sweated out waits of two to five hours. Broward reported record turnout for early voting, which ends Nov. 2.
Now, the debate over those achingly long lines has turned political. Some Democratic leaders contend the bill intentionally slowed down a process that has historically benefited the party.
''They were using their power, their majority, to make it harder for people to vote, to gain a political advantage,'' said House Minority Leader Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach. "It was horrible.''
Republicans dispute any political motives, saying the new rules set much-needed uniform standards while saving government money by trimming polling times.
The 82-36 House vote was largely along party lines, with Democrat motions to expand the hours all falling flat.
House Bill 1567 took effect during the 2006 election cycle. Before its passage, early voting centers could remain open for up to 12 hours on weekdays, and for a total of eight hours over the weekend.
Today, early voting sites are limited to eight hours on weekdays and a total of eight aggregate hours on weekends. Local governments are now limited to using libraries, city halls and election headquarters as polling sites.
In Miami-Dade, where early voting booths open at 7 a.m., the centers stop taking voters at 3 -- well before most people get off work. Broward's early voting precincts run from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the week.
One of the bill's sponsors, State Rep. Kevin Ambler, R-Lutz, said his constituents complained it was inappropriate to vote in places of worship, as some counties permitted under old rules.
''If you're Jewish and have to go to St. Timothy's Catholic Church, people complained to us and said they're bothered by that,'' Ambler said.
While absentee ballots, especially in Florida with its large military presence, tend to favor Republicans, early voting has largely benefited Democrats. Early voting figures across Florida show that of the 153,000 early votes cast throughout the state Monday, almost 56 percent were from Democrats, 29 percent from Republicans and 15 percent from others, according to the Florida Democratic Party.
Nearly a quarter of the Democratic votes were cast in Broward, Miami-Dade, Duval, Hillsborough, Palm Beach and Orange counties, the report said.
There were long lines everywhere Monday and Tuesday, with many places giving voters a number to wait their turn, as if in a store line that stretched for blocks outside.
At the North Miami branch library on Monday, the crowd was filled with many Haitian immigrants or first-generation Americans of Haitian descent voting for the first time.
James Gardner, a community college supervisor from North Miami, tried to vote there Monday but left.
''I thought it might take me an hour. It's already been 2 ½,'' he said.
Though the library stopped letting people enter the line at 3 p.m., some didn't reach a voting machine for another five hours, said elections office clerk Gerard Perez. ''We basically had a 13-hour day,'' he said.
Ten minutes before polls opened at the Southwest Regional Library in Pembroke Pines, a line stretched 150 strong -- and continued to grow.
Standing at the end of the line, Stan Lubin said he found the wait ironic.
''We're stuck in lines trying to avoid the lines,'' said Lubin, 64, of Davie.
The delays are likely to continue during the two-week early voting period. Since 2004, Miami-Dade has added 184,514 voters and is now up to 1,243,315.
Broward also totals more than one million registered voters, making the two counties the only ones in the state with that distinction.
Almost 22,000 voters in Miami-Dade and Broward cast ballots Monday. Miami-Dade, with 20 polling sites open for early voting and 9,000 trained poll workers, expects to spend about $6 million during the process.
Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Lester Sola said that for the past three years he has futilely sent legislative packages to Tallahassee seeking more control over the local early process. He is now required to provide a list of polling sites to the state 30 days before Election Day, but says counties need the flexibility to hold early voting outside traditional government buildings.
''Why overwhelm a library when you have a large regional park next door?'' Sola asked. "We had a lot more flexibility before.''
Sola said plenty of machines are in storage that will be used on Election Day when the county opens 765 precincts -- but he is limited in their use now because the size of the sites available.
Still, he says, staff are constantly monitoring sites around the county, and machines that check identification will be added where necessary.
He brushed aside a suggestion by U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, D-Miami, to offer those in line mail-in ballots instead.
''The last thing I'm going to do is offer an opportunity, and have that person not be able to vote. I'm not about to push one means of voting or another,'' Sola said.
After meeting with Meek, Sola said Goodwill Ambassadors will be added to locations to ease the comfort level, and the county's elections website will be updated constantly with the addresses of less crowded voting sites. Broward has also released expected wait times for its early voting sites.
Ambler, the Lutz Republican, said voters should not feel as if they are being deprived of the right to vote, and that people can always vote by mail.
''This is the first day of early voting. I think you'll see an initial push, and it'll taper down substantially,'' he said.
Late Tuesday, Sola said he expected more voters Tuesday than on Monday. He spoke briefly to Miami-Dade commissioners, telling them the lines were long but not unexpectedly so.
''Voting take sacrifice,'' he said. "And people are willing to take that sacrifice to cast a ballot.''
- Posted in
58 Comments so far
Show AllVoting take sacrifice?
If you slaughter a goat, do you go to the front of the line?
...or maybe slice open a vein when you get to the long line, and then pray you're still alive when you reach the voting booth.
Oh, wait. It's Florida. Make that a chicken.
Wow, check out the interview with Mark Crispin Miller on DemocracyNow! yesterday. He basically lays out the goods describing how the 2004 election was stolen by Karl Roves radical Christian computer engineer guru Mike Connell, through the use of some loopy computer architecture.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/22/votes
The interview is 20 minutes long... and is jam packed with Rove's worst nightmare.
"AMY GOODMAN: How? (was the election stolen)
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, basically, they use a kind of architecture that’s called Man in the Middle, and it involves shunting election returns data through a separate computer somewhere else. This is something that computer criminals do all the time with banks. Spoonamore explains that the Man in the Middle setup is extremely effective and basically undetectable as a way to change election results.
Now, the scariest thing is that Connell told Spoonamore that the reason why he has helped Bush-Cheney steal these elections for the last eight years has been to save the babies. See? We have to understand that there’s a very powerful component of religious fanaticism at work in the election fraud conspiracy. We saw a little bit of that in Greenswald’s film, where Paul Weyrich was talking about how we don’t want people voting. "
When I heard that "to save the babies", it made me retch. These people are PRO-KILLING. Lovers of WAR. Slaughterers -- It's not about saving lives. It's about their sperm and their impotence to make it stay where they put it. It's control. If only their mothers had visited a good clinic years ago..........
Look, we all know that the GOP is a criminal organization. Who will be brave enough to prosecute them for their voter suppression activities?? Maybe we need to lobby our state attorneys general to prosecute their statewide GOPs for their activities. How about it?
Save the babies?
So they can fight in the wars right?
Damn typical humans.
They should try to find the inhumanity inside them. Be more like pigs, rats, cockroaches, worms, and other benign inhuman beings.
Fight in wars? If their lucky enough to survive childhood without starving or going without healthcare...
The right to life ends at birth
This morning I voted (early) in Houston, Texas. It was a great sight to see the long line of voters waiting to cast their ballots. It was, however, also sad because my vote for President and those of many other voters will mean nothing here. McCain/Palin advertise themselves as “reformers”. I have not heard them or Obama/Biden for that matter promise that they will try to end this idiotic system.
You are probably right, but I think we may give them a bit of a surprise here and cause some knee knocking at GOP headquaters. At least we may get rid of Craddick.
Corrupt elections come in many flavors.
We should all decry, regardless of our politics, the abuses of democracy described in the base article.
Still, is it not these very same victimized Democrats who kicked their own "ballot-qualified" candidates out of their primary debates for nothing more than political expediency? What's that old saying about people in glass houses?
And what about the Commission on Presidential Debates? The League of Women Voters walked away from the debates when it became clear that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans were serving the American people and the cause of democracy. A pox on both their houses!
To exclude ballot-qualified voices from the national discourse is every bit as bad as cheating during the counting of votes or interfering with people's right to vote.
The Democratic Party is both victim and perpetrator in these crimes against the American people. It's time we held both major parties accountable.
i agree, both the Democratic and Republican parties have acted to subvert democracy, and the people need to fight for genuine democratic processes.
Genuine presidential debates would be one small step, and the participation of both duopoly parties in subverting debate is criminal.
Eliminating "corporate personhood" and eliminating corporate money from politics is the most important single step to making democracy possible; we also need proportional representation, instant-runoff voting, paper ballots, and "public budgeting" that puts public spending priorities in the hands of the people.
BUT: i see the team at the top of the Republican party as exponentially more dangerous and out-of-control than the team at the top of the Democratic party. The Karl Rove / Dick Cheney / neocon hard-core who have seized power very definitely see important differences between themselves and their Democratic counterparts. So much so that they will do absolutely anything to grab and hold onto power.
And as this team completes their strategy, and finally plunges this system into a much more naked form of fascism, i wonder: what is an effective opposition strategy? As they game yet another election (obviously very important to them to do so) or bypass the election entirely, what are we going to do about it? Blame the Democrats for their venal complicity and participation in the degradation of our political system? OK, but then what? There is still an especially nasty gang of Republican thugs carrying out yet another election theft...
I completely agree.
3.5 out of 10 by the way. Semi radical.
Everywhere you look, America is unraveling.
Count on southern Republicans to try anything to suppress the vote. The only surprise is their "astonishment" that the story is getting out and the finger is being pointed at them.
This is pure politics and vile and dirty politics at that.Someone please tell me a politician can stand there with a straight face and say that it is more important to save the taxpayers money by disenfranching said taxpayers at the polls?It just boggles the mind and the people should throy them out of office.Tony
It's long past time to get the political parties out of the voting process, and anything connected to it!
The theft of '08 has already taken place. My guess is a McCain victory followed by riots, followed by Martial Law. I could be wrong.
Unfortunately I agree that this is a likely scenario.
So do I.
Count me in, too. Get ready -- it's going to happen.
I'm not so sure. I still think that it will be such a landslide in favor of Obama that even the rethug election-stealing tactics won't work.
But I agree that if McCain somehow takes it, rioting is a distinct possibility.
I'll just say Obama has won it. None of the above will happen. 14 days I think.
Very interesting.
(Amy's interview with Mark Crispin Miller begins right after the newscast).
Early Voting Sees Reports of Voter Intimidation, Machine Malfunctions
Early voting has begun, and problems are already emerging at the polls. In West Virginia, voters using touchscreen machines have claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican. In North Carolina, a group of McCain supporters heckled a group of mostly black supporters of Barack Obama. In Ohio, Republicans are being accused of trying to scare newly registered voters by filing lawsuits that question their eligibility. We speak to NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/22/votes
Unfortunately, nothing happened when the Republicans stole, falsified and suppressed the vote in Ohio and Florida (and who knows where all else) in 2000 and 2004. We are more likely to have a complete economic meltdown as the last shreds of confidence in the US disappear than riots. Then maybe martial law. The Republicans would love that. They could all put on the jackboots they have been polishing
I hope you are.
Hang the expense of longer voting hours! If we can bail out the crooks and parade a candidate around in $150,000.00 wardrobe we can afford to have longer voter hours. Put your money where your mouth is for Pete's sake!
Impeach all elected Republican office-holders!
Dr Wu, the last of the big-time thinkers
''If you're Jewish and have to go to St. Timothy's Catholic Church, people complained to us and said they're bothered by that,'' Ambler said.
People like this need to get a life.
I heard that Arkansas is trying to repeal part of their Constitution that says "idiots and the mentally ill cannot vote" Perhaps we should have an amendment that idiots and the mentally ill cannot run for office.
.My goodness Thomas, what an unfeeling and unthinking remark.
Unfeeling:
Some of these elderly jewish folks are a generation or three closer to pogroms and other such christian entertainments and thus feel uncomnfortable in a church...
unthinking:
Seperation of church and state is important to many of us and seems to be fading alarmingly....
Care to think this through?
.
We see things, not as they are, but as we are.
Anais Nin
Hhhmmmmm...actually I hadn't thought of that. Point taken. Darn, thats twice I've been wrong this year!
.You are just getting it out of the way so that you can be perfect the next two months....
.
We see things, not as they are, but as we are.
Anais Nin
I will tell my wife that and see how far I get. Thanks!
Yes, it's a good point about the separation of church and state. But voting doesn't take place in the actual cathedral or whatever you call it, right? Every time I go to the local church to vote, it's just like some plain old room with voting booths and tables set up. It's never bothered me before. I do believe that we should adhere to strict separation of church and state, so it's fine with me if they ban voting in churches. Let's go ahead and ban churches, while we're at it : )
Maybe we need a Counter Coup to restore our republic!
Those long lines must be caused by all those Acorn people trying to vote multiple times. Would somebody get me Mickey Mouse's autograph while they're there?
I live in Dekalb County, GA. We have early voting beginning in early October and it was a breeze! I was in and out in 20 minutes! The lines are long and steady, but we have lots of machines and a goodly number of votes to cast. I must say everyone was in good spirits, patient and happy to be able to vote in lines that were manageable. I wish Florida residents the best with their current situation.
DeColores,
Rockerbabe1
Foridians this was done by JEB BUSH AND THAT CHARLIE CHRIS. I know that the lines are long and the wait is discouring but think what it would be if MCMANIAC AND SARAH THE SUCCESSIONIST RUN THIS COUNTRY< LOOK AT THE TIME 4 hours or 4 more years of MCCAINIAC
In Pinellas County (west coast of Fl) there are 3 early voting sites. In Hillsborough Co. (the next county over) there are 13 early voting sites. The supervisor of elections in Pinellas County, who is a Republican, will be lucky to hold on to her job.
I understand the bookies have 9:1 odds that Obama will win. They certainly are not thinking the election is going to be stolen with those kinds of odds! That gives me more hope than anything else I've heard!
Obama's got hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate bribes in his campaign accounts. Thus, corporate America also is certainly not thinking the election is going to be stolen either.
In fact, they'd probably be rather upset if their annointed successor to Bush had the elections stolen out from under them. And since this is the real power in the country, I doubt the Republicans are going to upset them.
----------------------------
"To know, and not to do, is not to know"
I vote in Winchester Wisconsin and I could vote in less than 5 minutes every election, every year. The key is paper opscan ballots and poll workers who know what they are doing in a small precinct.
Most of the polling places I hear about having trouble have thousands of voters - too many to do without real great - massive staffs.
My dad left 80% of his hearing in the South Pacific in WWII, my brother, his mental health and sobriety in Vietnam. Six boys I went through school with ended up in early graves because they served when Uncle Sam called them. These were sacrifices - the sacrifices of citizens who believed that they were protecting the rights and freedoms of the American people.
Voting - the marking of a ballot - has never been and should not now be, a sacrifice. It is a right and an obligation of citizenship. Anyone or anything that impedes the voting process is stripping Americans of their citizenship without due process.
Busque la verdad!
I totally agree! And that's why I get so mad about the rethuglican election fraud, and the corporate media's complicity. They're taking away our right to vote!
Go vote early where the rich folks vote they are not waiting in line,
If McCain wins burn the sonofabitchin' polls down. We gotta start demanding fairness sometime. I think this would get somebody's attention. This is about the only way something is going to change. Take action. Take back our democracy by force since this seems the only way it's going to happen. Viva la resistance. Power to the people!
I saw statistical analysis from statisticians at Berkeley after the 2004 election showing the very high liklihood of computer fraud in Ohio. (The correlation between exit polls and the published outcome was off the chart, basically.) Remember that Ohio used Diebold machines, produced by a company whose president had an important post in the Bush campaign and had vowed to do anything possible to win it for Bush.
We NEED to throw these MOTHER FUCKERS out of America! Get their names, the people who try to disenfranchise! Many from our past generations died to keep the right of voting viable in America. Post these peoples names on posters and billboards, panmphlets, etc.
Coffeelover,,,,,,
Well, how about the Democrats who control the San Francisco board of elections, and who worked to try to keep Cindy Sheehan off the ballot there?
"According to labor supporter and publisher Alan Benjamin, "the campaign turned in more than 400 signatures that had been checked thoroughly against the voter registration lists by the campaign organizers -- and yet only 95 were accepted by the Board of Elections."
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/08/07/18523719.php
BTW, The Sheehan campaign was able to overcome these hurdles placed in front of them by the Democrats and eventually be successful in getting on the ballot.
Voting is one part of the process. But, of course, getting on the ballot in the first place is another part of the process. When the choices to oppose the Republicans are restricted by Dem officials, that's another trick to try to remove people's chance at a free and fair election.
Or, maybe we should think about the Democrats and the Presidential debates? How free is an election when the parties work hard to try to make sure voters have a hard time even hearing a candidate speak?
So, when you make your list of the MF's, are you willing to put Pelosi and Obama at the top of the list?
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"To know, and not to do, is not to know"
www.samsonsworld.blogspot.com
Trillions for illegal wars and bankster bailouts, but not enough money for voting? Is there anyone left who believes such subterfuge? I think not -- I think we all understand what is happening except for the lunatics and the idiots; the issue is how the people can put an end to it and if they will 'make the sacrifices' to do it.
How about just not letting any Republican be a voting official ever again?
Democrats, independents, third party through ninth-- these can be our voting officials from now on.