A couple weeks ago, I alerted you to the fact that Florida voting machines were spending the weekend in the homes of poll workers.
http://www.dailykos.com/... Now, we all know how crazy that is but many locals were not at all worried about this. Unfortunately, they have reason to worry, especially if they are not Republicans. And the machines' social lives are just the start of Florida's Election Fraud Season.
Today was the primary in Florida. Early in the day, we had poll watcher reports of two different voting machines showing 40 votes each cast before the polls were open.
You might think "well, 80 isn't that many". To that I'd remind you that we have 285 precincts in Duval County. We had far fewer poll watchers. And all of us couldn't be there at 7AM for the opening of the polls. For example, I arrived at 5PM to close the polls. So, how many machines went unnoticed? Was it more like 500 extra fraudulent votes? We'll never know.
To make matters worse, our dear Supervisor of Elections had an "oversight" and forgot to make sure the heavily Democratic precincts had enough ballots. By 11AM, many were running out which forced upset Dems to use the paperless touch-screen Diebold machines. Those people were lucky. At least one precint had NO paper ballots available when the polls were opened. Surprisingly, someone is actually reporting on this locally. http://www.news4jax.com/...
If that wasn't bad enough, I personally witnessed two polling places, on opposite sides of town, with police cars, with police in them, parked menacingly at the front entrances. I obviously reported this. But again, I saw 3 of 285 precincts. Two of three had cops scaring people away. How many were there all over town? It's frightening to think.
I will end with some good news. The precinct where I was a poll watcher was great. The poll workers and clerk were excellent and handled every voter issue very professionally. They were nice to me. I watched about two hours of voting and every aspect of the closing of the poll down to the official dropping off of the ballots. The best part was that they had 586 votes there today. Only THREE people elected to use the touch-screen machine. It was a beautiful site! If only this was the case in the other 284 precincts.