President Obama was re-elected Tuesday. Mitt Romney’s campaign conceded defeat in Florida on Thursday. And a few indefatigable politicians are already planning on making pit stops in Iowa.
But in Florida, time stood still until Saturday. After days of counting absentee ballots, the official results are in, at last: to the surprise of no one, Obama narrowly beat out his Republican rival by 50 percent to 49.1 percent, a difference of about seventy-four thousand votes.
The state is consumed by finger-pointing and finger-wagging as election officials, lawmakers, and voters try to make sense of what went wrong on Election Day and during early voting. A record number of Florida voters— 8.4 million, or seventy percent of those registered— cast ballots. Of those, 2.1 million people voted early, and 2.4 million sent absentee ballots.
Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, said he planned to meet with the state’s top election official, Ken Detzner, the secretary of state, to see how Florida could improve the process. And the mayor of Miami-Dade County, where voters endured the state’s longest lines, has formed a task force to find out what went wrong.
“We could have done better; we will do better,” Detzner told CNN.
In some cities, voters waited as long as seven hours to vote on both Election Day and the eight days of early voting before it. While precincts in one area were nearly empty, others were overrun. In Miami-Dade, the last people to vote actually did so on Wednesday morning, two hours after President Obama was declared the winner and following Romney’s concession speech.
A few counties also grappled with a larger than usual number of absentee ballots, including a wave delivered at the last minute. The late crush of absentee ballots came after election officials, under pressure from a Democratic Party lawsuit, opted to allow voters to cast absentee ballots in person on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Miami-Dade County received about 54,000 absentee ballots in the final days, which slowed the counting process considerably, the local election supervisor said.
Detzner attributed the long lines to the turnout and the lengthy ballot, which included multiple races and eleven proposed constitutional amendments.
But Democrats also faulted the decision by Florida’s Republican-led legislature and Scott to change the state’s election law and shorten early voting from fourteen days to eight days, a move they said was meant to discourage turnout out among Democratic supporters. Minorities— and African-Americans in particular— vote early in disproportionately higher numbers.
Because early voting can only be held, by law, at libraries, election offices, and city halls, counties have a limited number of sites they can use. When lines became too long, many people skipped early voting and decided to vote on Election Day.
Last Saturday, when lines outside some places wrapped around buildings and scores of voters had their cars towed, Scott was asked to use his emergency powers to extend early voting, but he declined.
Recognizing the constraints of early voting, election supervisors, who opposed the 2011 changes in the law, have repeatedly requested more early voting sites. “When you are trying to change the rules in the middle of the game, it’s difficult to officiate it without tripping over yourself,” said Daniel A. Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Florida. “I think that’s what’s been happening.”
Rico says thank goodness the results didn't depend on these idiots...
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