# It couldn't happen again in Florida, could it? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 8, 2004, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188 "2004-07-08T23:49:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Homebrew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/c89c15/32.png) [@Homebrew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Homebrew)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2004, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/41 "2004-07-16T14:26:55Z")
> [@Martiju](#): > > I could probably google on this - but I figure it’s relevant to a discussion here anyway: > > Is it the case then, that people who have been convicted of a crime but have been subsequently released from prison cannot vote (or are these felons who have had a non-custodial sentence)? > > I ask, because there seems something odd to me about restricting democratic freedoms to people who have served the punishment for their crimes. I’d welcome some clarification and/or indications of the reasoning. [Depends on the state](http://www.soc.umn.edu/%7Euggen/Map1_DisenfranRestrict.pdf) (PDF) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2004, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/42 "2004-07-16T18:40:49Z")
> [@Martiju](#): > > I could probably google on this - but I figure it’s relevant to a discussion here anyway: > > Is it the case then, that people who have been convicted of a crime but have been subsequently released from prison cannot vote (or are these felons who have had a non-custodial sentence)? > > I ask, because there seems something odd to me about restricting democratic freedoms to people who have served the punishment for their crimes. I’d welcome some clarification and/or indications of the reasoning. In the period following Reconstruction, some Southern states, including Florida, passed legislation to bar ex-felons from voting, as a way of barring blacks from voting. In Florida this applies to all ex-felons as such; in some other states the law was crafted to apply only to persons convicted of what were thought of as “black” crimes, crimes blacks tended to commit. We discussed this at length in a recent GD thread: “Should inmates and ex-cons be allowed/denied to vote in elections?” – > **[Should inmates and ex-cons be allowed/denied to vote in elections?](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264702)** > > . The topic of this debate is whether inmates and/or released offenders should be allowed to vote in local, state or federal elections, or should be denied such rights. I’m not going to present any arguments for or against, I’ll leave that to you,... In Florida, ex-felons who have completed their prison sentences do not automatically get their “rights restored,” including voting rights. For this they have to apply to the state Office of Executive Clemency, and the application must be approved by the Executive Clemency Board, which is composed of the governor (Jeb Bush), the state attorney general (Charlie Crist), the chief financial officer (Tom Gallager) and the commissioner of agriculture (Charles Bronson). All four of these are elected constitutional officers, and at present, all four are Republicans. Here’s a link to the Office of Executive Clemency: [http://www.state.fl.us/fpc/exclem.html](http://www.state.fl.us/fpc/exclem.html) ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2004, 6:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/43 "2004-07-17T06:00:37Z")
> [@](#): > > …Gov. Bush said the mistake occurred because two databases that were merged to form the disputed list were incompatible… He’s full of crap. Data is data, it isn’t like blood types, or morning people marrying night owls. The operating systems may be incompatible, you may not be able to open a Linux based database application in Windows Access, for instance. But if you want to, you can manipulate the database _format_ in such a way as to transfer the data easily from one platform to another. It’s not altogether simple, but it is not by any stretch of the imagination a challenge. I do this kind of stuff, sort of a bottom feeding comp geek, developing applications, that sort of thing. I might hesitate to take on the task, given my skill level, but I know at least ten people who could knock it off in a weekend. Well, they’d bill for the weekend, maybe spend about 10 hours on it. “Incompatible databases” is the kind of semi-technical jargon one uses to bamboozle someone more clueless than oneself. He may even actually believe it, but its still crap. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2004, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/44 "2004-07-17T16:30:39Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > He’s full of crap. Data is data, it isn’t like blood types, or morning people marrying night owls. The operating systems may be incompatible, you may not be able to open a Linux based database application in Windows Access, for instance. But if you want to, you can manipulate the database _format_ in such a way as to transfer the data easily from one platform to another. It’s not altogether simple, but it is not by any stretch of the imagination a challenge. > > I do this kind of stuff, sort of a bottom feeding comp geek, developing applications, that sort of thing. I might hesitate to take on the task, given my skill level, but I know at least ten people who could knock it off in a weekend. Well, they’d bill for the weekend, maybe spend about 10 hours on it. > > “Incompatible databases” is the kind of semi-technical jargon one uses to bamboozle someone more clueless than oneself. He may even actually believe it, but its still crap. What you’re saying implies that somebody deliberately rigged the list to exclude Hispanics. Which raises the question: Who? Did Bush actually give orders to this effect, or did the contractor who produced the list (Accenture, I think) simply give the customer what it knew the customer wanted? 😉 Considering the amount of state funds that were spent on this project, I think there really needs to be an investigation. And of course there won’t be, so long as the governor is a Republican, the attorney general is a Republican, and both houses of the state legislature are controlled by Republicans. :mad: It’s because of this kind of situation that I conceived the idea of a separately elected fourth branch of government, the Tribunate, to police the other three. See my recent thread: [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264462](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264462) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2004, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/45 "2004-07-17T16:33:19Z")
Sorry, here’s the link: [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264462](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264462) ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2004, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/46 "2004-07-17T16:54:51Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > What you’re saying implies that somebody deliberately rigged the list to exclude Hispanics… Not necessarily. Only that his explanation is transparently bogus. Its like a techno-buzzword, something designed to convince the unsophisticated listener that Jeb is the innocent victim of a “glitch”. On the other hand, if one were conspiring to exclude black voters without excluding Hispanic/Cuban voters, I haven’t the foggiest notion how one would go about it, unless race/ethnicity were clarified in some manner. I believe the Bushiviks are somewhat corrupt, but don’t believe them to be brilliant. Or perhaps I simply don’t think they’re smarter than me, and I have no clue as to how such might be done. On the gripping hand, the sheer fact that so many blacks were excluded, who are dependably Dem, and so many Hispanics were not, who are dependably Pub, is a coincidence difficult to swallow, to say the least. Not proven. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2004, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/47 "2004-07-17T17:04:21Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > Not necessarily. Only that his explanation is transparently bogus. Its like a techno-buzzword, something designed to convince the unsophisticated listener that Jeb is the innocent victim of a “glitch”. > > On the other hand, if one were conspiring to exclude black voters without excluding Hispanic/Cuban voters, I haven’t the foggiest notion how one would go about it, unless race/ethnicity were clarified in some manner. I believe the Bushiviks are somewhat corrupt, but don’t believe them to be brilliant. Or perhaps I simply don’t think they’re smarter than me, and I have no clue as to how such might be done. > > On the gripping hand, the sheer fact that so many blacks were excluded, who are dependably Dem, and so many Hispanics were not, who are dependably Pub, is a coincidence difficult to swallow, to say the least. > > Not proven. Well, I didn’t say Jeb Bush is necessarily guilty (as noted, the contractor might be to blame and the governor might have plausible deniability). Only that there needs to be an investigation, at the federal or the state level. And since the state attorney general is a Republican . . . What’s that? You say the U.S. attorney general is a Republican too? ☹ ---
**Author:** ![pervert](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/bbe5ce/32.png) [@pervert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pervert)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2004, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/48 "2004-07-17T17:24:33Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > “Incompatible databases” is the kind of semi-technical jargon one uses to bamboozle someone more clueless than oneself. He may even actually believe it, but its still crap. I think this may be because you (or I) misunderstand the term. If one list (the list of convicted felons) contains information about race (including hispanic as a category) filled in by court personel, and the other contains information about race filled in by questioning the individual, then you might have a situation where a particular individual was listed as hispanic in one data set and as white in another. If you simply do not include any people on the list (remember the list will deny someone the vote) who are not listed identically in the two data sets, you could effectively remove lots of hispanics from the list without having commited any sort of bamboozle. What I’m saying is that “Incompatible databases” does not necesarily mean that one is in Access while the other is in DBASE. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2004, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/49 "2004-07-17T21:50:16Z")
I’m unsure of the implications here. Hispanics, at least the variety I’m personally familiar with, are pretty overwhelmingly Democrat and vote the straight party line…when they vote (when the CAN vote). My dad is one of the very few Hispanic Republicans I know. Now, this is just anacedotal, and means nothing of course, but I’d like to see that Florida Hispanics are overwhelmingly Republican. I suppose its possible, at least Cuban Hispanics living in Florida, but sounds fishy to me. More reasonably is that this was simply a fuckup by the government. As to the database thing, I’m more an infrastructure engineer, but I’ve done my share of database stuff as well and I think the use of ‘incompatable’ is plausable, but not as was meant. My guess is that the govenor, making that statement, didn’t have a clue what the hell he was talking about and just parroting things he knew nothing about. I COULD see two databases being ‘incompatable’ in the sense that there was no way to use a metakey between them, so no way to cross reference the data…and sorting them out was more trouble than it was worth on a field by field parse, especially if they used different formats or standards. This of course begs the question as to why their data isn’t standardized and cross keyed, but thats a different issue, and I can certainly believe the government is inefficient enough to have done this. Hell, I’d be willing to wager large sums they could be that stupid. -XT ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2004, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/50 "2004-07-18T19:02:25Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > I’m unsure of the implications here. Hispanics, at least the variety I’m personally familiar with, are pretty overwhelmingly Democrat and vote the straight party line…when they vote (when the CAN vote). My dad is one of the very few Hispanic Republicans I know. Now, this is just anacedotal, and means nothing of course, but I’d like to see that Florida Hispanics are overwhelmingly Republican. I suppose its possible, at least Cuban Hispanics living in Florida, but sounds fishy to me. More reasonably is that this was simply a fuckup by the government. If you read the newspaper articles linked in this thread and discussing this issue, you will see that most Hispanics in Florida are Cuban – refugees or exiles, or the children of exiles, who fled the country after Castro’s revolution, or the later wave of malcontents who were thrown out in the Marielito boatlift, or others who have crossed the Straits of Florida by boat in small dribbles over the past 45 years. In practically all cases, people who left Cuba because, for one reason or another, they hated living under Castro’s government. And they vote Republican because they see the Republican Party as more zealously anti-Communist than the Democrats. This is especially true in the Miami area. (It’s not so much the case here in Tampa, because our Cuban community is much older – many Cubans migrated here in the early 20th Century to work in cigar factories of Ybor City.) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2004, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/51 "2004-07-18T23:58:08Z")
And here’s another relevant story from today’s _St. Petersburg Times:_ [http://www.sptimes.com/2004/07/18/State/Vote\_illegally\_\_get\_c.shtml](http://www.sptimes.com/2004/07/18/State/Vote_illegally__get_c.shtml) > [@](#): > > Florida has spent millions in unsuccessful attempts to remove felons from voter rolls, and it waves a big stick at those who vote illegally: up to five years in prison and $5,000 in fines. > > Yet felons who vote have little to fear. > > Since the 1970s, fewer than 40 people have been convicted of casting an illegal vote, and only two have been sentenced to prison. Most receive probation for voting as felons, nonresidents or noncitizens. > > While prosecutors and elections officers say state records do not reflect all voter fraud cases because many of them go through pretrial intervention programs that wipe records clean, they agree voter fraud exists in much larger numbers. > > It is generally not considered a serious crime or one that merits a lot of attention. Voter fraud is largely ignored unless an election is questioned, someone complains or a voter is investigated on other charges. > > \ > > The Florida Elections Commission, which can levy civil penalties up to $1,000 for illegal voting, has never ruled that anyone violated elections rules by casting a fraudulent vote, a commission spokesman said. It has fined a handful of people for submitting false voter registration information. > > No elections supervisor in the Tampa Bay area has looked at county rolls after an election to compare lists of felons and those who voted. > > Florida is one of seven states that bars felons from voting unless their rights have been restored, a 19th century prohibition rooted in efforts to keep former slaves from voting. Attempts to amend the state Constitution to automatically restore felons’ voting rights have failed. > > In the 1990s, voter fraud grew with new federal motor-voter laws, which allow driver’s license applicants to swear they are qualified to vote with a check mark and a signature. > > After the 1997 Miami mayoral scandal, the Legislature passed a law in 1998 aimed at preventing voter fraud by requiring the creation of a statewide voter database and a list of felons that election supervisors would use to help identify unqualified voters. The law also provides for tougher penalties for voter fraud charges. > > \ > > Florida’s unusual voting prohibitions arm felons who illegally vote with their No.1 defense against criminal punishment: ignorance. Prosecutors must prove voter intent to deceive. > > \ > > The other major hurdles are time, energy and limited resources, especially since voter fraud leaves no specific victims and judges tend to give violators probation. The only two felons in the state sentenced to prison for voter fraud simultaneously served time for other, more serious crimes. > > \ > > While state law requires supervisors to weed out felons before an election, supervisors have no authority to investigate and pursue penalties after an election, said Jenny Nash, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood. They rely on complaints made to their offices, Nash said. > > Elections supervisors say they pursue voter fraud when they hear about it, but they don’t go digging. ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2004, 1:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/52 "2004-07-19T01:06:44Z")
The other big clunker in Florida 2000 remains a bleeding wound today: [Military vote in jeopardy](http://www.qctimes.com/internal.php?story_id=1030991&t=Nation+%2F+World&c=26,1030991) > [@](#): > > Problems with military absentee ballots that clouded the 2000 election have not been fixed, jeopardizing the ability of more than 160,000 troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to have their votes counted this fall. > A $22 million pilot program to develop an Internet voting system for Americans deployed overseas was scrapped after the Pentagon concluded it would be vulnerable to hackers intent on tampering with elections. > > The General Accounting Office, or GAO, found that the system used to collect and deliver mail in Iraq, including absentee ballots, suffers from long delays and other problems. I bet that we’ll see a lot of those post-dated ballots counted again this year. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2004, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/53 "2004-07-19T01:30:45Z")
> [@Squink](#): > > The other big clunker in Florida 2000 remains a bleeding wound today: > [Military vote in jeopardy](http://www.qctimes.com/internal.php?story_id=1030991&t=Nation+%2F+World&c=26,1030991) > I bet that we’ll see a lot of those post-dated ballots counted again this year. In 2000, it was the Bush team that insisted such ballots be counted, because they were sure active-duty military personnel would overwhelmingly vote Republican. And they probably did. But I wonder if that’s still true. Our troops in Iraq, who were sent to war on a lie and who keep getting their tours of duty extended, might be feeling a grudge against Bush. ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2004, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/54 "2004-07-19T02:03:04Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > But I wonder if that’s still true. Military polls are a lot like hen’s teeth. However, the [Military Times poll of last december](http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001825221_iraqdig29.html) showed 56% of those in uniform approved of Bush’s Iraq Attack. > [@](#): > > “Fifty-six percent is not very high in terms of support,” said Andrew Bacevich, a political scientist at Boston University and a retired Army officer. “There is plenty of reason to be skeptical of the handling of Iraq on the part of the people who are paying the price.” ---
**Author:** ![Mehitabel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8797f3/32.png) [@Mehitabel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mehitabel)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2004, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/55 "2004-07-19T03:14:24Z")
Is Katherine Harris up for re-election as Sec of State this year, and is she even running? Has any of the wrath of the electorate focused on her? If she’s not running for SOS, have the people who are said anything about what they’ll do? I used to work for the SOS of MA and was amazed and what had happened in FL in 2000; however, it is a tricky job running elections even without rampant underfunding and shifting and often transient population. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2004, 3:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/56 "2004-07-19T03:49:05Z")
> [@Mehitabel](#): > > Is Katherine Harris up for re-election as Sec of State this year, and is she even running? Has any of the wrath of the electorate focused on her? > > If she’s not running for SOS, have the people who are said anything about what they’ll do? Katherine Harris was the last elected Secretary of State of Florida; the office is now an appointed one. In 2002, Harris was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, from a district in Sarasota. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2004, 3:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/57 "2004-07-19T03:50:48Z")
BTW, other than the governor, there are now only three elected constitutional executive state offices in Florida: The attorney general, the chief financial officer, and the commissioner of agriculture. As I noted above, at present all these officers are Republicans; and, together with the governor, they make up the Executive Clemency Board that acts on applications to restore voting rights, and other rights, to ex-felons. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2004, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/58 "2004-07-19T03:55:33Z")
The current secretary of state is Glenda E. Hood, appointed by Governor Bush in 2003. From the Department of State website ([http://oss.dos.state.fl.us/background.html](http://oss.dos.state.fl.us/background.html)): > [@](#): > > Governor Jeb Bush appointed Orlando Mayor Glenda Hood as Secretary of State effective February 2003. She leads the Department of State as it transitions from an elected constitutional office to an appointed Governor’s agency. As Secretary of State she is responsible for the Department’s Division of Administrative Services, Division of Corporations, Division of Cultural Affairs, Division of Elections, Division of Historical Resources, and the Division of Library and Information Services. In addition, the Secretary of State is Florida’s chief elections officer and chief cultural officer. > > Governor Bush has charged Secretary Hood to work with Enterprise Florida and the Agency for Workforce Innovation in developing the state’s strategic economic development plan. She is also involved with Florida’s Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in its quest to encourage international partnerships among the 34 countries of the Western Hemisphere. Secretary Hood also serves as an ex officio member of the Base Realignment and Closure Advisory (BRAC) Council. > > Prior to her appointment as Secretary of State, Glenda Hood was elected the first female Mayor of the City of Orlando in 1992 and served three terms. In the fall of 2001, Governor Jeb Bush appointed then Mayor Hood as chair of Florida’s Domestic Security Advisory Panel, a core group of leaders from around the state, to advise him on Florida’s security issues. In early 2002, she invited Florida mayors to join Governor Bush, then Governor Tom Ridge and current Secretary of Homeland Security, along with the Florida Domestic Security Advisory Panel, for a Statewide Security Summit. ---
**Author:** ![Mehitabel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8797f3/32.png) [@Mehitabel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mehitabel)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2004, 4:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/59 "2004-07-19T04:22:26Z")
Thanks for the info! Wow. States are different. The SOS is the oldest elected office in Massachusetts besides the Governor, and it’s in our state constitution and all and I guess it would take an amendment to change that. And they’ve usually been Dems even though the last couple of Governors have been Repubs. I’m amazed that the Governor of FL gets to appoint the person who will administer the elections, including his, although I have no reason to doubt Hood’s integrity. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2004, 4:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188/60 "2004-07-19T04:27:07Z")
> [@Mehitabel](#): > > I’m amazed that the Governor of FL gets to appoint the person who will administer the elections, including his, although I have no reason to doubt Hood’s integrity. That’s why I think we need a fourth branch of government, to police the other three, but also to run “metagovernmental” functions such as elections and post-Census redistricting. Again, see my thread on the Tribunate: [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264462](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264462) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/it-couldnt-happen-again-in-florida-could-it/254188.md?page=4)