FL Democrats urge Crist and Browning to extend early voting and reduce long waits.

I am glad they are doing this, but why not sooner. I was also glad to see Rachel Maddow cover what the legislature here did. The Democrats knew they had shortened the hours for voting, and they knew they had limited the places to vote. Glad they are speaking out, but why not sooner?

Florida Democrats urge Crist to extend early voting



I have not heard much from the Florida Democratic legislators on this. I know they are in the minority, but they do have voices. They could have spoken out more loudly on this.

Someone was asking how the voting was going in Polk County. We knew the state early voting, not counting absentees (which have not been tallied yet)...was 2 to 1 Democratic.

Seems that Polk County as of midday yesterday was following the same pattern.

Chance to Vote Early Draws Many In Polk

another voting debacle during election 2008 like in 2000.

I'd say they were waiting to see if the lines went down after the first few days, or if the large turnout was in fact likely to continue. Not entirely unreasonable - there could have been an early surge of enthused voters that tapered off on Wed or Thurs. But that hasn't happened, and it's becoming very apparent that early voting hours simply aren't long enough to handle the turnout.

The Republicans in the state legislature passed laws to reduce early voting hours to make it harder for Dems to vote because Dems and particularly African Americans prefer to EV rather than ABV - and they passed laws to make it easier to absentee vote because that's how Republicans prefer to vote early. They made it so that one ABV request would be good until the 2010 General election back about a year ago.

This has backfired however in that Democrats have jumped on the ABV bandwagon and campaigns like Alan Grayson's in Orlando (among others) have gotten D's to sign up in droves for ABV's. (This helped Tony Sasso and Darren Soto get elected also).

Unfortunately there ARE the long lines now with EV'ing but the only soluntion is PERSISTANCE. Early vote ANYWAYS if you are early voting. Don't let the bastards convince you to quit!

Another little gimmick they have put in place is to place the candidate of the Governor's party at the top of the ballot in Florida regardless of alphabetical order. This is on the theory that people vote for the first name on the list more frequently than the last name. At the time this law was passed the Governor was John Ellis Bush.

The other morals of this story are:

1) Sign up for ABV in Florida as a general rule and vote in EVERY election and vote DEM all the way down. Voting ABV is the easiest way to vote but be sure to follow all the instructions very carefully. The SAFEST way to vote is EV because your vote gets run through the tabulator at the time you EV and if there are any problems you get to find out BEFORE election day and get a chance to fix them. ABV's are only looked at AFTER election polls close on election day - if there are any mistakes it's generally too late to fix them at that point.

2) Vote the Republicans out of office in Tallahassee and start reclaiming control over the state's election laws.

The Florida Democrats did not speak out loudly on this when it happened, and we are paying the price now.

They opposed cutting the hours, but they did not speak out very much.

country.

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