While clear just how surprisingly unneeded the FL votes turned out to be in securing President Obama's reelection, it remains unclear when final Sunshine State results will be ready. At the worst, we're looking at November 20th, the deadline for counting U.S. Military overseas ballots.
But it's not those military ballots that are creating the current vote counting problem. For the most part, it's not poor performance by County Elections Supervisors or their staffs either.
No, what has once again made Florida's electoral system the object of national ridicule and the punchline of choice for jokes about compromised voting rights is the carefully calculated plan developed and implemented by the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF), the plan to suppress traditionally Democratic votes in sufficient numbers to win a razor-close election - just like this one.
The simple truth is that over the past two years, the RPOF's legislative "super-majority" elected in 2010 spent a disgraceful amount of taxpayer time focused on forcing through various voter suppression initiatives - two of which combined to create this mess.
First, they cut the Early Voting period by nearly half, from 14 days down to 8. All these early voting days were well known to GOP strategists as important driving forces for Black & Hispanic voter turnout in high-density urban areas, like Miami. Republican Governor Rick Scott sided with his party's legislative leaders in claiming the move was intended to cut down on the possibility of voter fraud - even though the verifiable fact of the matter is, voter fraud perpetrated by individuals at local voting sites is extremely rare.
Then, that RPOF legislative super-majority pushed eleven convoluted amendments onto the 2012 ballot. Most originated not with them, but with the Tea Party. The addition of those amendments created a long and winding monster mash mess of a ballot - a ballot that was daunting, discouraging, and time-consuming to comprehend, much less to complete. And so, as they say, A + B = C...sort of.
Those tactics succeeded in making it harder for many South Florida Black and Hispanic voters in particular to cast their votes.
But then...the law of unintended consequences kicked in. Those voters started channeling the Twisted Sister classic song, "We're Not Gonna Take It".
[........]
So what was the sum result of this head-on collision between partisan political manipulation, and gritty grassroots determination? In 9 different Florida counties, so many thousands of extra Absentee Ballots flooded in over the final days that the system was overwhelmed. Elections office workers have been working tirelessly to get all the ballots counted, and they will.
But make no mistake here. This situation is is not the fault of those workers or of the Elections Supervisors. It is the result of a premeditated Republican Party of Florida voter suppression plan designed to interfere with Floridians' voting rights. While it succeeded in turning the presidential vote tabulation and reporting process into a nightmare, it also succeeded in revealing the ultra-partisan priorities and poor sportsmanship of the state's leading GOP legislators, and the governor."...."
