Voting Problems in Florida
There are still massive problems with our electronic voting system, as in Florida’s 13th Congressional District (coincidentally? Katherine Harris’s former district):
SARASOTA COUNTY — A review of Sarasota County voting results shows that in almost every precinct a high percentage of voters didn’t cast ballots in the hotly contested 13th Congressional District, a trend that likely affected the outcome of the race.
Democrat Christine Jennings lost to Republican Vern Buchanan by 368 votes, making it the second closest congressional race in the country.
More than 18,000 voters who showed up at the polls voted in other races but not the Buchanan-Jennings race.
That means nearly 13 percent of voters did not vote for either candidate — a massive undercount compared with other counties, including Manatee, which reported a 2 percent undervote.
If the missing votes had broken for Jennings by the same percentage as the counted votes in Sarasota County, the Democrat would have won the race by about 600 votes instead of losing by 368, according to a Herald-Tribune review. Even if the undervote had been 8 percent — more than three times what it was in Manatee — Jennings would have won by one vote.
While some have speculated that people simply chose not to vote in the District 13 race, many voters say the unusual undervote was caused by badly designed touch-screen ballots, which they say hid the race or made it hard to verify if they had cast their vote.
More than 120 Sarasota County voters contacted the Herald-Tribune to report such problems, almost all regarding the Jennings-Buchanan race.
But it isn’t going unnoticed by voter advocacy groups:
We’re been watching this closely in Sarasota,” said Lowell Finley, co-director and legal director for Voter Action, a national group formed in 2005 to challenge cases of voter fraud caused by electronic voting machines.
“The results are extremely irregular, and the fact that a large number of votes don’t seem to be counted in just one race on these electronic machines is a very suspicious circumstance. We don’t think the official results are accurate by any means.”
At the heart of Jennings’ argument is that 18,382 voters who cast ballots didn’t vote for anyone in the 13th Congressional District race. That’s about 15,000 more “undervotes” than in the last midterm election.
If Democrats can prove that a technical glitch caused the undervote, they’ll argue that Jennings won nearly 53 percent of the Sarasota County vote.
Many lower income people could not afford the time off for voting, especially with long lines. Further, few people can afford the time off to be election judges.
Most nations have a national voting holiday. We can do the same thing by simply moving Veterans Day to the second Tuesday in November. This would show that what the vets fought for is a reality–free and open elections where people can take the day off and actually afford to vote.
I agree. It should be a national holiday.
I think early voting largely solves the problem, but I like your idea a lot. Appropriate AND practical.