FLORI-DUH AGAIN?

       They don't call us Floriduh for nothin'. Last week we elected our own version of Trump to lead the state.  A similar regressive,  Rick "Skeletor" Scott, beat  the Dem's Bill Nelson, in the Senate race, by the narrowest of margins, forcing a recount.

   Yesterday I became one of thousands of volunteers trying to help this desperate situation.  Of course, we were hoping the recount, which was still continuing, would allow Senator Nelson to  squeak past Scott.  We still had a small chance for progressive light to shine on our Sunshine State.
    I drove to our county's elections office at 5 a.m. to serve as a "citizen observer".  I discovered that it is one of the rare times we don't have traffic problems in Miami.  If I had my way it would be 5 a.m. all the  time, "Traffic Sanity Savings Time". 

    Upon arrival I was asked to sit in a room with dozens of other volunteers.  Two were Republicans. I'm not sure I had ever seen one before.

 

    Republicans working for Skeletor

After three hours we were led into "the vote count room". 

    Surrounded by muscular, tattooed policemen and numerous not-pumped-up-at-all government officials, we then watched county employees sort ballots that had been rejected by the vote-count machines in the Florida's senate race.

   Observers were not allowed to touch them. That photo of me? I'm reading instructions. 

    Each ballot was perused by twenty two-person teams.  I watched over Team 13 with my Republican counterpart.  We were cordial but didn't talk politics.  We watched each Team 13 ballot as it was perused, classified, and placed accordingly into one of three bins.  

    There were "undervotes", thousands of ballots in which people did not choose who they wanted to be our next senator.  Most that I saw voted for all the other races. Did they think there was no difference between Skeletor and Mild Bill?  Did they drink too much cafe Cubano beforehand?  Go figure.  It was clearly on the first page of the monster 8-page ballot.
    A few were "overvotes", ballots where certain citizens voted for both senate candidates. One chose "everything".  This deranged person filled in every choice circle, voting for every candidate and every "yes/no" on referendum questions.  There are some weird voters out there.

    The third bin was the "I have no freakin' idea what this person wanted.  I'm letting someone else decide".  These were ballots in which people marked both candidates, then, they tried to clarify their mistakes with an extra circles, check marks, worded explanations, or what seemed like abstract art.
     These people should have said, at the time, "I made a mistake, please give me a new ballot".  It's an easy problem to rectify.  These third bin ballots were taken to the god squad ("canvassing board"). This group of five, in the front of the room, tried to make sense of this pile of ballots.  

Some came from as far away as California to help.






    So that's how it was at our county's elections office yesterday.  We were hoping for a recount miracle but it looks like that will not happen.
Skeletor's margin is as thin as a hair on your head bit it will allow him to regress our state for six more years.  It makes you want to move to California.
     On the other hand,  the Dems did quite well on a national level.  It gives us hope for our troubled country.
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