Florida

[digs]

Just wanted to sneakbrag on Wisconsin: we may freeze our toes off in February, but November was easier. Our ballot was “Prez, Senator, a couple of local offices, and done”. Oh, and done with a marker. No sneaky cyber-butterfly ballots.

(And we voted in a lesbian Senator with that system…)

[Revtim]

@Lanzy

I voted mail-in in Florida and took a few hours researching the questions on the ballot so I would not vote for something I did not understand. I would have been in shock to have seen that for the first time while standing in a booth.

I definitely saw stuff for the first time when voting in person in Florida. I just skipped the ones I felt I couldn’t make an informed decision on.

[Dogzilla]

My county also uses paper ballots with a marker. Every county in Florida does something slightly different, which is also probably part of the problem.

[Malden_Capell]

Reading about the sheer number of referendums you folks have over there has made me less enthusiastic about referendums than ever. Less is more, people!

[a35362]

And what if you have two (or more) clauses in a referendum, and you like one and dislike the other?

And the lighting in the rooms used as polling places is often quite dim – they have those privacy boxes, and your writing surface is often in shadow.

We used to have the punchcard ballots but switched to the Scantron sheets in the 2000 primary. Fill in the little oval with a black ball-point pen.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

They need to keep things simple.

Here’s my idea for a really simple system. The two people who are running for office go into a hall, and they both stand in separate booths. Then, the public comes in, and one at a time, they get to kick one candidate as hard as they can, anywhere they like.

The first candidate to call “enough!” is the loser.

[elucidator]

@digs

…(And we voted in a lesbian Senator with that system…)

Hey, Al Franken is a lesbian! Well, OK, no, but he’s Jewish, that has to count for something!

[Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew]

@digs

(And we voted in a lesbian Senator with that system…)

At my polling place we just got booths.

[SpoilerVirgin]

@a35362

And what if you have two (or more) clauses in a referendum, and you like one and dislike the other?

California Proposition 30:

1. Create four high-income tax brackets for taxpayers with taxable incomes exceeding $250,000, $300,000, $500,000 and $1,000,000. Yay!

2. Raise California’s sales tax to 7.5% from 7.25%. Yay?

I voted Yay! and the proposition passed, but I’m sure I’ll reconsider my decision when making purchases (my city sales tax brings the total to 8.75%).

[Marley23]

The AP has called Florida for Obama. The state won’t announce anything until the vote totals are certified on November 20th. Allen West also has not conceded and filed two lawsuits to get the voting machines impounded, but one of them has been thrown out of court. Both results are outside the margin for a mandatory recount: Obama beat Romney by 0.9% and Murphy beat West by 0.7%. Recounts are triggered if the margin is under 0.5%.

[scr4]

@Euphonious_Polemic

They need to keep things simple.

Here’s my idea for a really simple system. The two people who are running for office go into a hall, and they both stand in separate booths. Then, the public comes in, and one at a time, they get to kick one candidate as hard as they can, anywhere they like.

The first candidate to call “enough!” is the loser.

We want shorter lines for voting, not longer.

[elbows]

What will happen next time?

3months before they declare a winner?

I say it’s time to institute a deadline on Florida. Get your results in, by such and such time/day, or we don’t count any of them!

[2ManyTacos]

I’ve come to the conclusion that Florida has no fucking idea how to conduct elections. Not calling the winner until four damn days after the election already happened? Holy fuck that’s ridiculous.

[Morgenstern]

@Foxy40

I really blame a lot of the problems and delays on the actual voters. Each registered voter was mailed a sample ballot. If you didn’t get one, you could find it in multiple places on the internet. My son and I stood in line with our samples all filled out and ready to be copied to the official ballot. Few people had done this. SO as ladyfoxfyre said, people had to read and decide on 11 long amendments of which it was for many, the first time they have ever see them. What we wondered at the time is why didn’t the officials go up and down the line with the samples so people could be better prepared when they walked in to the polling place. It would have made a huge difference.

I applaud FL voters tenacity. Standing in line for up to 7 hours to vote would make me one cranky old bastard when I got to the booth. I"d probably have voted NO on milk for babies by then.

[drewtwo99]

@Morgenstern

I applaud FL voters tenacity. Standing in line for up to 7 hours to vote would make me one cranky old bastard when I got to the booth. I"d probably have voted NO on milk for babies by then.

I want to echo this sentiment. Honestly, it really touches my heart to hear about people waiting in line to vote until after midnight, or possibly even 1am if reports are to be believed. That really means a lot to me.

To be fair though, people should have researched the ballot and decided ahead of time how they wanted to vote.

[Leaffan]

What if you just voted for the president and left the rest blank: would you presidential vote count?

[BrainGlutton]

@Leaffan

What if you just voted for the president and left the rest blank: would you presidential vote count?

Yes.

[UltraVires]

@Dogzilla

Okay, here is a very small example.

First, you should know that Florida legislators are lazy. Instead of actually just passing laws, like other states do, when they want to do something that would NEVER pass in a million years, they propose a state constitution amendment. Generally, these are worded in the trickiest way possible, with double, triple, and quadruple negatives, which obfuscates the language so much, even professional editors (such as yours truly) have trouble parsing out wtf the language actually says.

So there were eleven constitutional amendments on Florida’s ballot this year, and that’s just for the state. I’m sure there were referenda in some of the 67 different counties. Add in your local races and you’re looking at very long ballots. I understand that the ballots in Miami-Dade were something like 10-12 pages long. Mine was two 2-sided 24" pieces of paper.

This is the language for Amendment 8 this year:
“Proposing an amendment to the State Constitution providing that no individual or entity may be denied, on the basis of religious identity or belief, governmental benefits, funding, or other support, except as required by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, and deleting the prohibition against using revenues from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.”

The first part of that sounds pretty good, right? Religious freedom, YEAH! And if you only read that bit, you’d be all for it. The last bit “… and deleting the prohibition against…” is where things get confusing. There’s three negatives in there, canceling each other out. It almost sounds like Florida wants to enact religious freedom in this state, as if we didn’t already have it. But when you think that through, and parse out the language, what you discover is that Florida wants to spend state dollars on churches, religious schools and the like, therefore using public funds for private religions, which clearly goes against the federal constitutional amendments about Congress not establishing a state religion and separation of church and state. Can you imagine if that had passed? Which religion gets the most funds? Shall we fund the Jewish schools in Boca Raton? Or the Fundie Christian schools in the panhandle? How much do the Catholics get? What about the Buddhist temple down the street, how much do they get for running a pre-K program?

So that’s why it takes so goddamn long to vote in this state. It’s not just a list of names and you go down the list and check 'em off. That bit goes fast. It’s the “read the state amendments and try to figure out wtf they’re really trying to do” that takes a minute. In my county, they send out sample ballots about a month ahead of time, so there’s plenty of time to read and study and try to figure it out. I actually sat down at a kitchen table with some friends and our sample ballots and we brainstormed through the language until we were satisfied we understood what they all meant. That little exercise required one PhD, one Master’s Degree, a Journalism degree, and two of us were editors. Oh, and we also had to down several beers each.

I have a 10 second rule for ballot referendi…If I cannot understand the proposal within 10 seconds, it gets my “no” vote because they are trying to bullshit me.

The sad part is that after about 2 minutes, I understand and would vote “yes” for state funding of religious schools (so long as there is no discrimination between religions), but if you cloak it in bullshit, it gets a “no” vote from me.

[Lord_Feldon]

@Leaffan

What if you just voted for the president and left the rest blank: would you presidential vote count?

@BrainGlutton

Yes.

And some people do that. In my county, the number of votes decreases as you go down the ballot:

President: 77,567
US Senate: 76,363
US House: 75,380
State House: 73,703
County Commissioner: 67,078
County Recorder: 69,947
State Board of Education: 55,504
State Supreme Court: 58,598, 58,674, 59,857
Judge of the Court of Appeals: 51,892

[Leaffan]

How many did the dog catcher get?