Wednesday March 12, 2008
Yeah, what is it about Florida and voting? I mean, we can’t even have a vote for best burger without “voting irregularities.”
Wednesday January 30, 2008
Ye election results: YES on slot machines, YES on the property tax amendment, YES on the Miami “bill of rights,” McCain, Clinton, and of course it wouldn’t be elections in Florida without some clusterfuck disenfranchisement.
Tuesday January 22, 2008
A Citizens’ Bill of Rights has been added to the January 29th elections ballot. Here is the question, and here is the ‘Bill’ itself (I think). So it looks like this crappy Herald article is wrong — it’s not “Miami voters,” it’s “Miami-Dade voters” (thanks again, Miami-Dade officials, for making this extra confusing), not an insignificant distinction. What the article does not bother to do is to explain just what consequences this measure might actually have. Update: I’m wrong wrong wrong: the “Bill of Rights” is a City of Miami thing, the County thing is something else.
Wednesday November 7, 2007
SotP takes a swipe at Coconut Grove Grapevine.
Miami Beach will have a runoff for the Mayor’s post, and all your election results at the Herald.
Monday November 5, 2007
Double the Vote
Double the Vote, a project of Category 305, is out to increase participation in local elections, starting with tomorrow’s elections in Miami Beach, Miami, Hialeah, Surfside, Homestead, and Golden Beach. Only 10% of registered voters vote in local elections in Miami-Dade. This is particularly silly when you realize that in local elections, every individual vote is proportionally much more important then a vote in national elections, and that local issues have much more effect on your day-to-day life then national ones.
Ah, but who to vote for? Who follows local politics, anyway? Well, DtV has links to information about Miami Beach candidates at Category 305, and the Sun Post and Miami Vision. See also the Herald’s recommendations for tomorrow from their politics page, which links to numerous stories related to the election(see also this). So read your ballot, do your research, tell your employer you’ll be in late tomorrow cause you’re voting (prepare for looks of shock, but most bosses have no problem with this), and off to the polls first thing in the morning.
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Tuesday July 31, 2007
33% of election polling clerks found incompetent, fired
Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor Lester Sola is all proud of himself, because he just fired 261 election polling clerks because they failed a test on voting procedures. That’s out of 787 that took the test (more are still to be given). Here he is: “We could have very well continued like we did in the past, just making sure there were warm bodies. This year, we said, ‘Enough is enough.’”
Nice work, Lester. No use crying over the spilled milk of the botched elections of the last few years, eh? Oh, and where do you plan on hiring more competent folks willing to work for $8 to $11 an hour for two days a year?
In any case, the article is an interesting read for the detail it gives about election procedures. This is rich, too: “‘I think we can all vouch for that one,’ said Commissioner Natacha Seijas, whose Government Operations and Environment Committee oversees Sola’s department. ‘We do need to professionalize our elections.’”
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Monday February 12, 2007
Charlie Crist wants to get rid of all the electronic voting machines in Florida. I say great. But just before we do, I want someone to add up exactly how much they all cost (in equipment, training time, and fixing time, putting aside the priceless lost votes), and I want to sock someone in the jaw. Seriously. Find me the idiot who actually made the decision to spend that money and let me hit them just once.
Thursday January 25, 2007
“Here is a good question for you: There were 150,399 ballots cast in the election. If you add the yes and no votes together they total 149,335. What happened to the other 1,064 ballots?”
Wednesday November 8, 2006
WTF, Herald?!
Check out the Herald: As of 5:41 am, this page shows Jim Davis at 53.55%, and this page, not to mention the cover, is declaring Christ the new governor. WHAT THE HELL, GUYS — PEOPLE CARE ABOUT THIS STUFF!
I know it’s been a long night for y’all, but is nobody at the the controls over there? Update: Eddie points out that the graph represents only the voters in Miami-Dade.
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Tuesday November 7, 2006
Voting-day observations
- Go vote dammit. That means you! It’s part of your civic responsibility. (Take an umbrella with you — it’s going to rain.)
- Actually, there’s more to your civic responsibility. According to Noam Chomsky, your vote becomes more relevant if you (1) pay attention to the issues and (2) discuss them with other voters. If you’re like me, you haven’t really done enough of either, especially as concerns local politics. You know voting in local politics is more important then the nationals, right? Now’s the time to start taking an interest; let’s keep tabs on whoever’s elected, and think how who’s ever not elected would have done different, and be better prepared for next time.
- Elections website. Get a sample ballot, a list of voting sites, info on what to bring (hint: photo ID), and voting results.
- How to vote from last time. A tempting strategy is to vote the opposite of the Herald’s recommendations, on the logic that you cancel out a non-thinking drone, and give more of a voice to anyone who’s looked into the issues and made an intelligent decision. Of course the problem is that lots of people make informed, intelligent, and wrong decisions, so the intellectual and mathematical validity of this approach remains uncertain.
- Here’s the Herald’s elections page, with links to recommendations and all that.
- From personal experience, I know that if you haven’t notified the voting department about an address change, you should go to your old voting location, not the new one.
- Keep an eye on those fucking machines.
- Check in with our friends at the Elections Reform Coalition. My computer has trouble with PDF’s, so their website is like a broken monitor to me, but they might have some good advice. At the very least, try to take some photos of your polling place.
- Final thought: the Carter Center and the National Democratic Institute monitor elections in many countries around the world. On the radio the other day, Carter said that elections in the USA don’t even qualify for the monitoring, because they don’t meet the basic requirements. For example, they require standardized voting procedures for the countries they monitor. Yikes!
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Tuesday September 5, 2006
How to vote
It’s election day, y’all! Time for us to celebrate the fact that we live in a free (sort of) country, and maybe even make some changes to make that country better. Oh, but wait, these are local elections? Well, crap, who bothers with the small-time shit? Local government doesn’t do the really important stuff, and nobody knows any of the names, so why bother?
Well, of course voting in local elections just as important as in the nationals: this is about the money and decisions that are closest to us, and since (all the more reason) very few people are voting, one vote can be a really powerful voice. The way it rarely is in, say, presidential elections. Though it was in 2000 in Florida, a super-close swing state, and so, thanks again to you jerks that voted for Nader. But I digress. The question is, how do you decide who to vote for today? I present to you some possible methodologies:
- Keep up with local politics all year. Then you’ll be ready. Of course it’s too late to do that now. And by the way, I write a local blog, so I should know more then the average person about this stuff, but I’m pretty clueless.
- Just print out the Herald’s recommendations and vote down the line with the Herald (or vote down the line opposite what they recommend, you anarchist you).
- Delve deep into the Herald’s logic and decide on which points you agree with them or not. Which would be a lot easier if there were a competing
newspapernews source in town who’s recommendations you could compare against the Herald’s. God love Miami Today, but their only mention of the elections just isn’t very helpful in this regard. The New Times? Helpful . . . if you’re wondering who writes the dirt. (Ok, I admit—it’s me. What, the slick design didn’t give it away?[1]) Biscayne Boulevard Times? Nope. - I was going to suggest keeping up with the results throughout the day, and voting for whoever’s behind, the idea being that it’d make it easier for those who do know what they’re talking about to get those people elected, despite, say, the Herald’s recommendation. But now I’m not sure this approach is mathematically correct. After all, you might be counteracting the votes of just those well-educated voters.
So where does that leave us? I guess reading up in the Herald (And, no, the Sentinel’s coverage doesn’t say peep about Miami Dade elections.), and cursing the darkness. You should also check out the antidisenfranchisement guide at Hidden City. The official Miami-Dade elections page.
[1] Joking.
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