Florida

Articles about voting issues in Florida.

State Steps Up Effort Against Illegal Voters | NYTimes.com

May 182012

In an attempt to clear the voter rolls of noncitizens, a move that had set off criticism and a threatened lawsuit, Florida election officials decided on Thursday to use information from a federal database to check a list of 182,000 voters who they suspect are not citizens, officials said. Since last year, the Florida Division of Elections had sought access to the immigration database, which is maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, but the department said there were legal and technical difficulties in sharing the information. On Thursday, the elections division asked the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, which oversees driver’s licenses and originally compiled the list of 182,000 names, to use its access to the federal database to update its records and cross-check the names. … The state’s attempt to scrub registration rolls of illegal voters had come under fire because of the timing — less than seven months before a presidential election — and because the state itself could not guarantee the accuracy of its rolls. Read More »

Election chiefs skeptical of voter purge | Palm Beach Post

May 182012

Florida’s local election supervisors on Wednesday sounded skeptical, and even distrustful, of a push by the state to remove thousands of potential non-U.S. citizens from the voting rolls just months before the critical 2012 elections. The supervisors, meeting at their annual summer conference, peppered state election officials with questions about the list of more than 2,600 people who have been identified as being in Florida legally but ineligible to vote. That list was sent to supervisors recently, but state officials have also said there may be as many as 182,000 registered voters who may not be citizens. State election officials want the state’s 67 county election offices to reach out to those on the list, determine their citizenship status and remove them from the rolls if they are not U.S. citizens. But election supervisors – including Democrats and Republicans – asked a range of questions about the level of proof that state election officials had regarding the citizenship status of voters which was culled by comparing voter registration lists to a state driver’s license database. They said they wanted more information before they purge someone from the voting rolls. Read More »

Republican-backed voting laws blamed for drop in new voter registrations | ABC

May 172012

81,000 fewer new voters. That’s what one researcher says is the difference from four years ago, before new, restrictive voter registration laws went into effect in Florida. It’s just what opponents of the laws feared would happen. When Governor Rick Scott signed the law that requires volunteers registering voters in Florida to register with the state last year, the reaction was swift and angry. It was called voter suppression and “Jim Crowesque.” Even the non-partisan League of Women Voters refused to go by the new rules that gave them only 48 hours to submit registration forms to the state. ”The law is vague and cumbersome and it would put our volunteers at personal risk of fines, so we decided instead to challenge it in court,” said Mickey Castor of the League of Women Voters. Read More »

Timing of scrubbing noncitizens from voters rolls worry election supervisors | Tampa Bay Times

May 172012

In February, county election supervisors got some news from the state motor vehicle agency: A database audit in April 2011 had identified more than 20,000 potential non-U.S. citizens on voter rolls. But the Florida Department of State, which knew of the audit, didn’t begin forwarding a portion of those names to county election supervisors until recently — just six months from the presidential election in November. That yearlong delay has frustrated many election supervisors, who worry database scrubbing could be tainted by accusations of politics this close to an election. Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted in the review, an analysis by the Miami Herald found. Read More »

Noncitizen voter database has flaws, local elections officials say | Tampa Bay Times

May 162012

Florida election supervisors, at their annual convention in Tampa this week, find themselves focusing once again on a familiar and troubling issue: the accuracy and reliability of the state voter registration database. It’s not a problem of their making, and that only adds to their frustration. As the elections officials convene, they are simultaneously seeking to verify the legal status of about 2,700 voters who were red-flagged by the state motor vehicle agency as non-U.S. citizens and thus ineligible to vote. Problem is, some people on that list can legally vote. One of the people on the list is Manoly Castro-Williamson, 48, of Wesley Chapel, a U.S. citizen and a registered Republican who has voted in every election in Florida since 2004. She was one of 13 potential noncitizen voters forwarded to Pasco County by state elections officials. Read More »

Registering Voters A Whole New Game In Florida | NPR

May 152012

Six months before the presidential election, the Florida ground game is already under way. In political terms, the ground game is the process of mobilizing voters and getting them to the polls. And the first step is registering people to vote. But in Florida this year, there are tough new restrictions on groups that conduct voter registration drives. The restrictions already appear to be having an impact on the number of people who are registering to vote. ”We go to dense Hispanic neighborhoods — shopping plazas, supermarkets,” says Natalie Carlier of the National Council of La Raza, “and basically we’re just out there talking to people, letting them know that we’re providing a service and that we want them to vote.” Read More »

State law hinders vote audits | Palm Beach Post

May 142012

Candice Hoke votes, but with some skepticism: “There’s truly no legitimate basis for trusting this election software when we know it is erratic, that it sometimes produces valid results and sometimes not.” Hoke, founding director of the Cleveland-based Center for Election Integrity, said a ballot count after the election is one key way to sidestep vulnerabilities in technology. But there’s a problem. Under Florida law, supervisors can audit only a tiny slice of ballots after an election – typically no more than 2 percent of precincts – and only after the winners are formally declared. ”In defense of the legislature in Florida and elsewhere,” Hoke said, “they are not trained in software; they have often been told software and computers can’t make mistakes.” Read More »

The hunt for non-citizen Florida voters exposes partisan divide | MiamiHerald.com

May 142012

Amid an increasingly partisan dog fight, Florida elections officials say the number of potential non-citizens they’re examining on the state voter rolls is 180,000, a figure far higher than what was initially reported. Florida’s Division of Elections said Thursday that it’s combing through this initial, mammoth list of names — which were flagged during a computer database search — to make sure its list is as clean and as small as possible. The state is then turning over smaller batches of the more-verified names to local county election supervisors, who are contacting the potential non-citizens to see if they can lawfully vote. By the end of the process, the state could send counties as many as 22,000 names to check, one election source indicated, in a state with more than 12 million total voters. Right now, local supervisors have been sent nearly 2,700 names, about 2,000 of which are in Miami-Dade, Florida’s most-populous and most-immigrant heavy county. Read More »

58 percent of voters targeted in Florida noncitizen hunt are Hispanic. Whites, GOP least likely to face purge | Miami Herald

May 142012

Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted in a state hunt to remove thousands of noncitizens from Florida’s voting rolls, a Miami Herald computer analysis of elections records has found. Whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal, the analysis of a list of more than 2,600 potential noncitizens shows. The list was first compiled by the state and furnished to county election supervisors and then The Herald. The numbers change by the day. The state’s Division of Elections says it initially identified roughly 180,000 potential noncitizens by performing a search of a computer database that doesn’t have the most-updated information. Read More »

Despite state oversight, vote-counting errors abound in Florida | Palm Beach Post

May 112012

Harri Hursti may be the best-known hacker you’ve never heard of. Largely unknown to the voting public, the Finnish computer programmer gained national notoriety among elections officials in 2005 when he broke into voting equipment in Leon County – at the supervisor of elections’ invitation – just to show it could be done. Hursti has since gone on to examine voting systems for other states. His conclusion: “Some systems are better than others, but none is nearly good enough.” In fact, a decade’s worth of Florida vote counting has been tripped up by technology of all makes and models, despite a state certification process designed to guard against such problems. Nationally, studies of the secret code underpinning election software have uncovered an array of troubles. Read More »

New post-election audit method could improve detection of vote-counting flaws – and fix them | Palm Beach Post

May 102012

In California, 13 million people voted in the 2008 presidential race. But double-checking the result could have been as simple as looking at the right 96 ballots. Post-election audits in Florida are done with hand recounts of a sliver of ballots, taken from a few random precincts. They help identify widespread problems, as one did recently in Wellington, when it caught the fact that results for three races had been accidentally switched by Palm Beach County’s vote-counting software. But they tell you nothing about what happened in precincts that weren’t checked. In theory, a huge problem could go undetected. A new method of audit – developed by Philip Stark, statistics department vice chairman at the University of California, Berkeley – gets around that. Stark’s method works like an opinion poll, by looking at a random sample of ballots from across the race. The key word is random: The ballots have to be picked with precision, from a master list of every ballot cast. Once picked, only that ballot will do. The number of ballots reviewed depends on the margin of victory. Tighter races need more ballots. In California in 2008, Barack Obama won with 61 percent of the vote, so 96 ballots would do. If Obama had won with 52 percent, the state would have needed to check about 3,900 ballots, Stark said. Read More »

State probes possible voting by foreigners | MiamiHerald.com

May 092012

Thousands of foreign citizens — particularly in South Florida — might be registered to vote in Florida and could have unlawfully cast ballots in previous elections. The potential problem is largest in Florida’s largest county: Miami-Dade, where the elections supervisor is examining 2,000 potentially unlawful voters, WFOR-CBS 4 News reported Tuesday. Broward is examining 260 suspected foreign voters. One suspected noncitizen voter has been registered for about 40 years, CBS 4 found. Over the past year, the Florida Division of Elections has begun identifying potential foreigners on the rolls in coordination with the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, Division of Elections spokesman Chris Cate told The Miami Herald. He said the state has forwarded the names to county elections supervisors, who are in charge of the rolls. “There will be more names,” Cate said. Read More »

Voting machines: Full of defects, easily hacked | Palm Beach Post

May 072012

After the punch-card fiasco of 2000, the promise of high-tech voting equipment was clear: It would count correctly, the first time. Results would come quickly, cleanly, with digital certainty. There would be no room for error. Twelve years, more than $20 million and two high-tech solutions later, Palm Beach County ballots are tallied on a system linked to four major errors in as many years. Most recently, it shifted votes in Wellington to declare that two losing candidates had won. Months before the county agreed to buy it, security experts blasted Sequoia Voting Systems’ equipment as riddled with bugs that jeopardized votes. It was easily hacked. Even the instructions were confusing. ”We found significant security weaknesses throughout the Sequoia system,” scientists wrote in a review ordered by California. “The nature of these weaknesses raises serious questions as to whether the Sequoia software can be relied upon to protect the integrity of elections.” The four errors, coupled with what the experts found, call into question the ability of the county’s system to perform two basic tasks – count votes correctly and keep them secure. Read More »

Election officials frustrated with reform law's implementation | electionlineWeekly

May 042012

In 2011 Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed into law sweeping election reform legislation that limits third-party registrations, decreases the length of time for early voting and creates more reasons to cast a provisional ballot. At the time the governor signed the legislation into law, many supervisors of elections throughout the Sunshine State were concerned about the impacts the new law could have not only on their offices, but also on voters. Now, just about a year later, some of those concerns, in the eyes of the people responsible for administering elections, seem justified. “Several of the changes were very unpopular with supervisors of elections, but at the end of the day, barring court intervention, we must implement any new laws passed by the legislature and signed by the governor,” said David Stafford, supervisor of elections for Escambia County. Stafford is also the current president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections. “That said, as an association we will continue to advocate for changes to Florida’s statutes, including provisions contained in HB 1355, to improve the administration of elections in our state,” Stafford said. Read More »

Palm Beach County upgrades troubled vote-counting computer system | Sun Sentinel

May 032012

Palm Beach County commissioners on Tuesday agreed to upgrade vote-counting software, just over a month after a vote-counting mix-up in the Wellington city council election. The software improvements cost $117,450 in a deal with Dominion Voting Systems, Inc. Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher had the deal in the works before the Election Night problems in Wellington. Bucher in March initially blamed software problems for her office naming the incorrect winners in two Wellington races. The software upgrades and other procedural changes are supposed to iron out any problems like those that occurred in Wellington and speed up Palm Beach County’s traditionally slow vote counting. Read More »

Congressional, legislative districts approved by U.S. Department of Justice | Orlando Sentinel

May 012012

The U.S. Department of Justice gave its blessing to Florida’s proposed legislative and congressional maps on Monday, clearing one of the last remaining hurdles for the newly drawn districts to be in place in time for the June 4-8 candidate qualifying period. Florida is required to seek “pre-clearance” from DOJ’s Civil Rights Division for most election-law changes because five counties have a history of racial discrimination in elections. The one-page letter from Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas Perez is boiler-plate, stating Attorney General Eric Holder “does not interpose any objection to the specified changes” to the maps. ”However, we note that [the federal Voting Rights Act] expressly provides that the failure of the Attorney General to object does not bar subsequent litigation to enjoin the enforcement of the changes,” it adds. Read More »

Court Rules Against Democrats on Florida Congressional Map | Roll Call

May 012012

A Florida state circuit court ruled against a Democratic challenge to the state’s new Congressional map, denying a motion that the map violates the state constitution and declining to issue an injunction against the map. The news comes hours after the Department of Justice greenlighted the GOP-drawn Congressional map. This, in effect, means that Democrats are probably stuck with the map passed by the GOP-controlled state Legislature earlier this year, which keeps most of the 19 Republican Members in comfortably safe districts. While Democrats could appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court, legal observers believe it is probably too late to change the 2012 lines. “The Florida Democratic Party led an unprecedented effort to ensure that the will of the people was heard in the redistricting process and to hold the Republican-led Legislature accountable to Florida’s Constitution,” FDP Executive Director Scott Arceneaux said in a statement. “We remain concerned about elements of the map and we will continue to evaluate our legal options moving forward.” Read More »

Rubio fined for taking improper donations | Politico.com

Apr 282012

The Federal Election Commission has fined Sen. Marco Rubio $8,000 for accepting more than $210,000 in improper contributions during his 2010 run for the Senate. In a negotiated settlement finalized last month but only publicly released now, Marco Rubio for Senate acknowledged taking in more than $210,000 in “prohibited, excessive and other impermissible contributions” during his Senate campaign and failing to refund or “redesignate” the funds within the allowed time frame. Read More »

Governor Scott angers election supervisors | MiamiHerald.com

Apr 272012

Florida’s election supervisors are rising up in opposition to Gov. Rick Scott in the wake of his push to rank them. State election officials have drawn up a list of rankings based on criteria that includes how quickly counties reported election results during the Jan. 31 presidential primary and when those counties set up early voting sites. The list was supposed to be released this week, but it has been delayed after a loud outcry by county supervisors. The rankings are being criticized because nearly all supervisors are elected, and there are fears the list is a prelude to the Republican governor asserting more control just months before the crucial 2012 elections. ”I’m not a department under the governor, nor should I be,” said Ann McFall, the Republican elections supervisor from Volusia County. “He’s an elected official, I’m an elected official. He doesn’t rank me.” David Stafford, the GOP elections supervisor of Escambia County, also pointed out that voters assess them at least every four years. Read More »

Third-party groups are registering voters – very carefully | Orlando Sentinel

Apr 262012

In light rain outside a south Orlando pizza shop last week, Yohan Fonseca worked the trenches in one of Florida’s most contentious political battlefields. He was registering voters. ”I love this work,” Fonseca, said after convincing Ramon Morales, 26, of Orlando, to fill out a registration form. “It’s really good to help the community. We need to vote.” Fonseca, 22, of Davenport, is a paid organizer for the non-profit Hispanic group National Council of La Raza. He and others are going where some long-time voter registration organizations say they are afraid to go: anywhere in Florida. Since passage last year of a new Republican-sponsored election-law rewrite, fierce debate has raged over whether new rules make it tougher for people to register and vote this election year. Among other changes, new law requires groups and individuals to turn in voter forms within 48 hours – they previously had 10 days – or face fines of $50 per late application, up to a maximum of $1,000 per organization per year. Read More »

Election law review will extend into July | AP/MiamiHerald.com

Apr 252012

A federal court review of Florida’s new election law will extend into July, just a month before the Aug. 14 primary. A Department of State spokesman on Monday said Florida is prepared to use two election laws if the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., doesn’t rule before the primary. A judge last week issued a schedule that doesn’t require final briefs to be filed until July 9. Read More »

Arguments begin over redistricting Florida’s congressional districts | MiamiHerald.com

Apr 202012

With the election clock ticking, a Florida circuit court judge said Wednesday he will decide quickly on whether to throw out the Legislature’s congressional redistricting map, develop a new map in a matter of weeks or leave it alone. “I am very much aware of the logistical problem we have,’’ said Judge Terry Lewis of the Second Judicial Circuit, referring to the prospect of invalidating all or part of the congressional map and creating a new one in time for candidates to qualify to run in June. Lewis must not only consider the impact of revising the districts in the midst of election season, but must navigate complex and conflicting arguments over racial politics in Florida. Faced with an unprecedented assignment for a Florida circuit court judge, Lewis asked lawyers about the redistricting software he might use, the kinds of data that would be available and suggested that there is a downside to conducting an expedited trial that results in the court taking control of the Legislature’s work product. But after six hours of hearings in which lawyers for opponents asked him to reject the map and lawyers for legislators urged him approve it, he announced: “I’m going to treat it seriously. I’m going to do the best I can as quick as I can and I’m going to address everybody’s arguments.” Read More »

Senate Argues for Its New Redistricting Map | Sunshine State News

Apr 172012

The second draft of the Legislature’s redistricting plan for the state Senate answered all of the objections of the Florida Supreme Court to the first proposal and should get justices’ approval, according to a Senate brief in the case. The brief, filed in response to complaints by the Florida Democratic Party, a coalition of voting-rights groups and the NAACP, came a week before oral arguments on the plan before the court. Also on Friday, the justices issued an order dividing two hours of arguments among the Senate and the groups opposing the plan. Lawyers for the upper chamber argued in the 100-page filing that the new plan, approved by the Legislature after justices rejected the first draft, “addressed each of the flaws this court found.” Read More »

Dominion says Elections Office should have known how to use the election software, avoiding errors in Wellington election | Sun-Sentinel.com

Apr 052012

Palm Beach County elections officials could have averted a software glitch that erroneously awarded two Wellington Village Council seats to losing candidates if they had followed the instruction manual, the manufacturer has told state election officials. Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher vehemently denied the claim. “I read the reference guide three times yesterday,” she said. “Nowhere does it tell you to check for this, ever.” Even as the question of who is to blame grew murkier, a clearer picture of the error itself emerged Monday, with the company, Dominion Voting Systems, sending out a national advisory warning election officials how to avoid a similar mistake. In the advisory, Dominion also suggests that the mistake could have been caught before the election had one key test been performed differently. The so-called “synchronization” error was caused when Bucher’s central vote-counting software was lined up to accept races in a different order than they appeared on the Wellington ballot. As a result, election-night totals on Wellington’s three races were shifted in a circle – with village council Seat 4 votes going to the mayor’s race, votes for mayor going to council Seat 1, and votes for Seat 1 going to Seat 4. On Monday, Bucher said the error occurred when her staff entered the titles on the ballot of each position, such as “Seat 1.” Read More »

Report: Florida one of the ‘five worst states for voting rights in 2011′ | Florida Independent

Apr 052012

The Center for American Progress released a report today on voter suppression efforts carried out by Republican-led state legislatures around the country, listing Florida as one of “five worst states for voting rights in 2011.” As we at The Florida Independent have been reporting, Florida lawmakers passed a new voting law last year that has drawn fire from federal officials, legislators, advocacy groups and voting rights experts from all over the country. The many critics of the law have said the law is a concerted effort to keep minorities, young people, the elderly and the poor from the polls on Election Day. Florida’s contentious law places prohibitive rules and restrictions on third-party voter registration groups, creates a shortened “shelf life” for signatures collected for ballot initiatives, places new restrictions on voters changing their registered addresses on election day, and reduces the number of early voting days — among many other provisions. Read More »

E-voting system awards election to wrong candidates in Florida village | Computerworld

Apr 042012

An optical scan vote tallying system, now used by some 300 U.S. municipalities, misreported the results of a Palm Beach County, Florida, municipal election last month. Dominion Voting Inc.’s Sequoia Voting Systems device mistakenly awarded two Wellington Village Council seats to candidates who were found in a post-election audit to have lost their races. The results were officially changed last weekend after a court-sanctioned public hand count of the votes. According to a story in the Palm Beach Sun Sentinel , the Sequoia vote counting software was set up in a way that didn’t correspond to the Wellington County ballot distributed to voters. As a result, votes meant for one candidate were credited to a different candidate. In a product advisory notice issued last Friday, Dominion warned customers that problems could arise if the contest order on a paper ballot does not match the ballot order programmed into Sequoia machine. ”The contest order on the ballots in the database can become out of sync with the contest order shown on the corresponding paper ballots,” the company noted. If the issue is not identified during pre-election tests, “election results will show the correct number of votes, but assigns them to the wrong candidate” the company said in the advisory. Read More »

Legislature seeks federal redistricting review even without a final map | Miami Herald

Apr 042012

The Florida Legislature’s legal team has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to begin the process of reviewing its legislative maps for compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act, even before the Florida Supreme Court signs off on a final product. In a March 30 letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, lawyers for the House, Senate and attorney general asked the federal government to expedite its a pre-clearance of the maps so that candidates will know the district boundaries when they are required to qualify during the week the June 4. Under the Section 5 of the federal Voting Rights Act, Florida must submit its legislative and congressional maps for approval, or pre-clearance, because five counties – Collier, Hardee, Hendry, Hillsborough and Monroe – have a history of discrimination against racial or language minorities. Download Preclearance_Senate Read More »

Tangled Web: Wellington, Florida Drama Highlights Complexity of Technology, Value of Audits | Election Academy

Apr 032012

An extraordinary story is emerging from an election from the March 13 municipal election in Wellington located in Florida’s Palm Beach County. Election Night returns indicated that two hotly-contested council elections had been resolved in favor of two candidates, but then a routine post-election audit suggested that their opponents had actually won due to errors in tabulating the county’s optical scan ballots. Following a court-ordered manual recount, the revised totals were confirmed. As if that weren’t extraordinary enough, a battle is now underway between the county clerk and her vendor about who was responsible for the error. The clerk is blaming the vendor, saying that the error – which appears to have been caused by a “synchronization” problem between vote-counting and tabulation machines – is something she and her staff have never seen before and thus could never have been expected to catch, let alone fix. Read More »

Dominon Voting Systems now rebuts Bucher's account of Wellington ballot snafu | Palm Beach Post

Apr 022012

The maker of Palm Beach County’s voting machines has told state officials its software did not cause the glitch that led to incorrect results being certified in two Wellington races, according to a letter from the company – a statement that starkly contrasts with Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher’s explanation for what happened. A “shortcoming” in the county’s vote-counting software allowed the error to go undetected, and the software did nothing to stop it, Dominion Voting Systems acknowledged. But the manufacturer disavowed responsibility for the error itself, saying, “it is clear that the mismatch was not the result of a ‘bug.’ “ Bucher has said the opposite. After the error was revealed March 19, she said the company had taken the blame and released a sharply worded press release that started with: “Technology fails.” Read More »

It's official: Wellington finally has its winners | Palm Beach Post

Apr 022012

In the end, there was no confusion. No name calling, no questionable motives. Instead there was order. Perfect order, and hugs. A hand count predicted to last six hours Saturday lasted exactly six hours, the same hand count that the county’s top election official guaranteed would match a second tally of votes for Wellington’s messy March 13 council election. The winners: Bob Margolis for mayor, John Greene for seat 1 and Matt Willhite for seat 4. It was a relief for everyone involved, including voters. ”Now there’s no dispute,” said Wellington resident Frank Ventriglio. Ventriglio and his wife came to witness the hand count at Palm Beach County’s elections service center in Riviera Beach, on his 57th birthday, no less. ”We wanted to see the democratic process at its best,” Theresa Ventriglio said. Read More »

Wellington election: Judge approves request for hand recount for disputed election | OrlandoSentinel.com

Mar 312012

Several dozen pairs of eyeballs will examine ballots from Wellington’s disputed election when a hand count begins at 8 a.m. Saturday in the county elections office, the finale — or so many hope — to a string of lawsuits and weeks of confusion over the voters’ choices for three village council seats. ”Just get it done,” candidate Al Paglia said. “The sooner, the better.” On Wednesday, within a half-day of the village’s canvassing board deciding that a manual recount was the only way to swear in winners indisputably, seven Wellington residents filed a complaint in Palm Beach County Circuit Court asking for just that. Judge Robin Rosenberg on Thursday ordered a manual recount of the March 13 races, which yielded incorrect winners because of an apparent software error. Read More »

Super PACs, donors turn sights on judicial branch | The Washington Post

Mar 312012

Just before sunset on a recent evening, scores of lawyers in dark suits and polished loafers streamed into the swanky 18th-floor ballroom of a downtown high-rise here. They sipped chardonnay and nursed Heinekens, munched on cheese cubes and made small talk. The invitation to the event had asked for a “suggested contribution” of $500 to each of three candidates, who were now mingling sheepishly among the crowd. They were no ordinary politicians. In fact, they weren’t politicians at all, but rather Florida Supreme Court justices. Each has been in office since the 1990s, each retained by voters overwhelmingly in previous elections, and each now reluctantly campaigning — for the first time. While deep-pocketed super PACs and ultra-wealthy donors have attracted plenty of attention in the presidential contest this year, they are also making waves further down the political food chain. The mere possibility that a rich benefactor or interest group with endless amounts of money could swoop in, write massive checks and remake an entire court for ideological reasons has prompted judges here in Florida and elsewhere to prepare for battles they never expected to fight. Read More »

Wellington voters file suit to speed recount of ballots | Palm Beach Post

Mar 302012

A hand recount could come soon for Wellington residents weary over disputed election results that have left the village council in limbo. On Wednesday, one day after the village’s canvassing board said it wanted a hand recount, seven Wellington residents filed a complaint, as did council candidate John Greene, seeking a court-ordered recount of Wellington’s March 13 races. The county’s elections office and the canvassing board Tuesday agreed to file lawsuits for the recount, but did not say when those filings would happen. ”We’re not going to wait on them,” said Greene, who filed a complaint late Wednesday in Palm Beach County Circuit Court. ”If a hand recount is what is going to appease everybody, we want it to happen. We want to move on.” Read More »

Wellington canvassing board certifies revised election results subject to hand count | Palm Beach Post

Mar 292012

The village council has no newly sworn members and looks exactly like it has for the past few years – despite a March 13 election for three of its five seats. The same council members will rule until and unless a hand recount makes clear who prevailed for mayor, seat 1 and seat 4. Wellington’s canvassing board voted unanimously tonight to certify election results from a March 19 revised tally of votes – subject to their confirmation by a hand count. That means the results still aren’t official and that until and unless there is a hand count – which could take only one day, but must be ordered by a judge – the pre-election council is seated. ”What a mess,” Wellington Chamber of Commerce Vice President Victor Connor said as he left the meeting. Read More »

Restrictions on Voter Registration in Florida Have Groups Opting Out | NYTimes.com

Mar 282012

Florida, which is expected to be a vital swing state once again in this year’s presidential election, is enrolling fewer new voters than it did four years ago as prominent civic organizations have suspended registration drives because of what they describe as onerous restrictions imposed last year by Republican state officials. The state’s new elections law — which requires groups that register voters to turn in completed forms within 48 hours or risk fines, among other things — has led the state’s League of Women Voters to halt its efforts this year. Rock the Vote, a national organization that encourages young people to vote, began an effort last week to register high school students around the nation — but not in Florida, over fears that teachers could face fines. And on college campuses, the once-ubiquitous folding tables piled high with voter registration forms are now a rarer sight. Read More »

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