TALLAHASSEE -- Brace yourselves, Florida voters: The election ballot you’ll see this fall is longer than ever.
It’s so long that voters will have to fill out multiple sheets with races on both sides, then feed those multiple pages through ballot scanners, one page at a time.
It’s a pocketbook issue, too: Some people who vote by mail will have to dig deeper and pay at least 65 cents postage and up to $1.50 to return their multi-page ballots in heavier envelopes.
More than ever, county election supervisors say, people should vote early or request an absentee ballot to avoid predicted bottlenecks at the polls on Election Day, Nov. 6.
“This is the longest ballot I can remember,” said Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark. “The voter who sees this ballot the first time may need smelling salts.”
The ballot will be chock full of choices, for president, U.S. Senate, Congress, the state Legislature, county offices and merit retention for judges, all the way down to city and county referendums.
But what may prompt some voters to rub their eyes in disbelief is the Legislature’s decision to place 11 proposed changes to the Constitution on the ballot, some of which appear in their entirety.
“They have really created a monster,” said Monroe County Supervisor of Elections Harry Sawyer Jr. in Key West.
http://www.miamiherald.com/...
Traditionally, campaigns will "chase" the absentee ballots as soon as they are mailed to voters, through phone calls, door to door follow-up and targeted mail. Also traditionally, local precinct captains and teams in strongly organized areas will work those voters to make sure their ballots are returned.
(One such absentee program spearheaded by a state Senate candidate created a recount situation where the victor, who won by 17 votes after recount, is being challenged in court due to rejection of 40 absentee ballots on technicalities.)
I have been told that 40,000 voters in Palm Beach County requested absentee ballots and a shade over 26,000 actually utilized the ballots. Less than 100 requested cancellation, leaving nearly 35% of the eligible ballots either not returned or rejected, if those request numbers are correct.
After studying voter turnout statistics from Tuesday’s election, officials from both major parties said their campaigns to get out the vote by convincing voters to stay at home and cast absentee ballots is working.
Unofficial results revealed that 22.6 percent of the voters in Tuesday’s election cast absentee ballots. Surprisingly, Democrats — who traditionally cast fewer absentee ballots than Republicans — out-voted Republican absentee voters. Democrats cast 16,357 absentee ballots to the 10,034 filed by Republicans.
“Look, the Republican Party used to beat us pretty badly in absentee but no longer, because we’ve turned our attention to it,” said Mark Alan Siegel, chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party. The party’s campaign to encourage absentee voting included calling registered Democrats, 0ffering to help voters fill out their absentee ballots and deliver them.
Siegel said Republican efforts to purge voters rolls and require more scrutiny of drivers licenses and other forms of identification at the polls have intimidated voters. Those anxieties can be avoided by voting at home, Siegel said. “There is a lot of voter-suppression legislation that operates at the polls in ways that does not affect people who vote at home.”
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Mr. Siegel unfortunately resigned his post last week after a poorly timed religious themed interview was edited into a hit piece by Republican operatives.
To get back to the title of the diary, even with both local parties having a strong infrastructure in one county in South Florida, up to 35% of the absentee ballots went unused. How many were not mailed due to postage costs is obviously not known, but logic would indicate that could be one major factor. A 5 or 10 page ballot is daunting to any voter in the voting booth and when trying to work through it at home coupled with having to affix that much postage could push the decision of many voters that its not worth the trouble, unfortunate and ill-advised as that decision would be.
The state will have 12 full text amendments on the ballots next month when they are mailed, coupled with local amendments and local races, a nightmare is in the making in some areas.
“To understand these full-text amendments, you almost have to be a Harvard lawyer,” said Sharon Harrington, the Lee County elections supervisor in Fort Myers.
Hillsborough County, for one, is underwriting the cost of the postage on all absentee ballots, for $150k, a daunting challenge for other more populated counties such as those in South Florida.
President Obama made a visit to West Palm Beach this weekend, stating that as goes Palm Beach County goes the country. While campaigns, national or local, cannot pony up stamps to voters to encourage them to return the ballots, I'm sure that other civic benefactors might be able to do just that, whether its a corporation seeking publicity or a democratic leaning Super Pac (if permissable under law).
The voter suppresion effort in Florida by the Republican legislature and Governor are well documented. They even voided the requirement of having short descriptions of ballot questions in favor of full text (all of which should be rejected, by the way.)
The best way to fight organized voter suppression is to get the votes in, by any means allowed.