Governor Rick Scott has signed Florida’s new elections reform bill into law, but will that solve the problems that arose during last year’s Presidential election? Some say yes, but others say there’s more work to do stop long lines at the polls and protect the state from further embarrassment. Last year, Florida encountered a lot of problems during the 2012 presidential election from counting delays to long lines at the polls. “You shouldn’t have to wait four or five days after the election to know who won the electoral votes from the state of Florida. We shouldn’t be yellow when everyone else is red or blue. We should be able to get that right. You shouldn’t have to wait for six hours to vote,” said House Speaker Will Weatherford following a Work Plan Tour in Tampa.
Weatherford along with Senate President Don Gaetz made it a priority this Legislative session to reform Florida’s electoral process to avoid those kinds of delays.
The newly signed the election reform package allows for more early voting sites, gives elections supervisors a choice in expanding early voting days, and shortens the length of the ballot. Some say an elections bill Governor Rick Scott signed into law in 2011, which was championed by the Republican-led Legislature and cutback early voting days from 14 to 8, was a major factor in the state’s recent election problems.
“We believe with what we did this year solves a lot of the challenges we have in our elections process and takes us from a state that has been lagging and frankly embarrassed ourselves on a couple of occasions to hopefully be a model when it comes to our elections process and the Senate President and I said very early on that it should be a bipartisan issue, it was, and it’s a product that I’m very happy to see the Governor sign,” Weatherford added.
Full Article: Election Reform In Florida: Is The Conversation Over? | WFSU.