Posted 9/11/2002 07:32:00 AM by Ocean Guy
It's not unbelievable, though I wish it was: more election problems in Florida. Here in North Florida they switched to the simpler optical scanners instead of the slick touch screen monitors. The touch screen monitors, by one report, took almost 6 minutes to set up and boot up.... there were problems. As in most of the state there were few problems to report, but oh how the problems were highlighted by their sheer stupidity. More...

One precinct's poll workers didn't realize they had to turn the machines on delaying poll opening by 90 minutes. More than one precinct had no poll workers show up and other volunteers had to be found to get the polls open. One local precinct gave voters the wrong ballots, and many voters weren't sharp enough to realize they had the wrong party's ballot. Thankfully someone was,

"The names [on the ballot] were slightly familiar, but I didn't find most of the people I was looking for," said Stephen Bowen, among those who brought ballot problems at East Pointe Baptist Church in Arlington to the attention of election officials.

Other precincts closed at the originally scheduled time, ignoring media and voters’ reports that the governor had ordered the polls to stay open until nine. The local news interviewed one such precinct supervisor sometime past 7, after she had turned voters away. Her response was that the last official word she got was the polls close at 7pm..... I guess the governor isn't official. But then she had the audacity to blame the media for spreading the word that the polls were open till nine..... That was unbelievable. Still More...

Another precinct didn't have any Republican ballots, machines crashed at another but the best story was an interview with one of the gubernatorial candidates, Daryl Jones, who had boasted, during the campaign, of all his work in election reform. I'll post a link as soon as I find it. But here's some more...

The sad part of the story is that virtually all of the problems were in precincts that had problems in the 2000 General Election. Then Polling place workers in some areas were instructing everyone to, "Make sure you vote for someone on every page." Too bad there were two pages of presidential candidates and well over 10,000 over-votes were cast aside. Perhaps there was too much effort in the Get Out the Vote drive and too little effort into even minimal training for poll volunteers.

Whatever the problems, it appears we are in for a couple of more days in the spotlight for what Congresswoman Corrine Brown called yesterday's "Widespread election irregularities." Janet Reno will likely contest the election results... Stay tuned this could get interesting.