If you do a search for “hanging chad” you will be flooded by photos and stories of the 2,000 election and the mess it was in Florida. Some of the photos became iconic and forger of memes and even the New York Times had an article last week asking if Florida was ready for the election.
20 years later and once again we are dealing with a boondoggle of counting and even possibly recounting, late Mail In ballots or not even counted yet along with Early votes.
But none of that happened in Florida.
About 5 other states where election laws are simply designed for the idiocy of twisting the results they do not like, are immersed in a controversy of votes appearing out of nowhere and Nevada was saying the results won’t be ready till Thursday. The excuse flouncing around is that this elections saw an increased number of voters and it takes time to count them all, specially early voting and Mai Ins.
Bullshit.
So how did the Eternal Electoral Joke known as Florida did in this election? If you guys were following me last night, we were pretty much done by 9:30 pm. By then Trump had achieved the 300,000 plus votes advantage and it grew after that into almost 400,000 as the night progressed. Oh yes, I forgot: The official vote counting did not begin till 8:00 pm EST because Florida has 2 time zones and they waited till then.
What about Early voting and Mail Ins? Votes mailed in were 4,852,639 and early votes were 4,332,221. All votes run almost 11 million and we were “done” by 9:30. The Media refused to call the state for its own sinister reasons, even after the math said it would not be a change.
Even the much maligned Broward County which screwed up by the numbers in the 2016 elections, had its crap together and performed faultlessly. Of course, they had removed the old democrat supervisor of election Brenda Snipes and was replaced with Republican Peter Antonacci who shaped up the department in such a manner, even his political (and suspicious) contrarians give him praise. And no scandals have shown from Broward, not messed counts, no “failing” counting machines. Hey, Democrats got re-elected. That says something, right?
So, no. There is no excuse for the “screw up” we are witnessing other than being tailored for a potential cheat… well, potential my flat arse. No Florida Man jokes for the elections this year.
When Florida puts its mind to it, it fixes problems.
Like when Hurricane Andrew wiped part of Miami down to the slabs, they put in New building codes, rebuild the beaches and breakwaters, dug canals, mandated flood insurance, etc.
Subsequent Hurricanes have been far less damaging. Other places (New Orleans) got hit, didn’t make changes, then got obliterated.
Florida fucks up big but fixes it for next time.
Same with the Firestorms of 1998. Before, under a series of weakling governors and county commissioners, Florida basically stopped any prescribed burns and forest management.
After 1998? We have some of the best burn programs, and we keep our forests under control.
Unlike California which has had wildfires in the dry seasons since, well, man first started keeping records of said fires. But, strangely, it’s always the loggers’ and the outdoorsmens’ fault, not piss-pour forest management…
I’m a computer geek. It is what I do for a living. I’ve been doing it a very very long time. I deal with things that create large numbers of records. I’ve got websites that generate 6 million records per day that have to be processed every hour. It just gets done.
When I was at university in 1980 we had a card reader that could read 1200 cards per minute. We had 3 of them. Just that one set of readers was capable of 250,000ish cards per hour. It would have been no issue to have a dozen of those reader in place. That’s 1980’s technology.
Yesterday I handed my ballot over to the machine. It read both sides of the ballot in less than a 10 seconds. Much slower but still, it was much faster than the people that walked through.
With today’s technology there is NO excuse for it to take hours to count ballots. At worse you have to manual deal with a few rejected ballots.
5 million mail in ballots? The slow part is confirming they are legal ballots. Counting them? Come on man!
Oh, I got to watch the climatology department feed cards one day. Lady arrives with a stack of 25+ boxes of 2000 cards each. She was able to load a box, start the read, add the next box, empty the out tray and keep up with that reader with no problems. She read 50,000 cards in about 40 minutes. Not one glitch, not one rejected card.
So thank goodness this year Florida got it right. My state seems to have gotten the counting done correctly, even if Trump didn’t win.
Good examples. Where there is a difference it is in the users.
When that lady arrived with 50,000 cards, she had a vested interest in ensuring each and every card was correct, doublechecked, and clear of any hanging chads, rips, tears, or bumps. (I remember the batch computing days. Don’t miss them one bit.)
When it comes to automatically reading ballots, you have to deal with the geriatric with parkinsons, the moron that thinks if one mark or hole is good, two must be better, etc… My ballots are fill in the little oval with a black felt tip pen. I cannot imagine the number of ballots that are half filled in, or look like a three year old coloring outside the lines.
It is no wonder that recounting or certifying a ballot is a time consuming process.
I still remember some of the headlines and one-liners regarding the Bush/Gore election. Things like, “When does a ‘pregnant chad’ give birth?” (accompanied by a photo of a chad that had been “pressed” and domed out, but not popped out).
Florida was a laughingstock then. I’m glad they got their acts together.
I remember them explaining how a fully punched home with a hanging chad didn’t mean that the voter intended to vote for Bush because there was a slight indentation in the Gore position inductive of the voter intending to do vote for Gore and just making a mistake in which hole to punch.
There were a few Dems running unopposed. For those I filled out the write in bubble and wrote “other” just to make sure that the didn’t get my vote.
I find it ironic that the state that the Dems claimed was responsible for costing Gore the election, so cleaned up it’s voting process as to become a model of efficiency and speed.
Funny how damaging a liberal gets bureaucrats motivated.
Doubly ironic that it bit them in the ass this year. G-d truly does have a sense of humor.
Now do Pennsylvania, please.