Editorials

Let's hope Florida's future elections run more smoothly

TBO.com
Published: January 20, 2013

We would like to congratulate Gov. Rick Scott for suggesting that Florida voters get more days and more places to vote than they did during the last general election. Unfortunately, he holds much of the blame for all the problems during the last election, and we don't believe it was just an accident.

Scott proposed last week that voters have up to 14 days of early voting in the next Florida election, in an effort to shorten lines and tabulation confusion in heavily populated areas. Highlands County did fine, but in a few other crucial places, it was an embarrassment.

He also wants to allow voting on the Sunday before the election, which wasn't allowed this year. That day is popular for early voting for the African-American community following church services.

The Republican-led Legislature pushed to lessen early voting days, and Scott agreed, during this last election cycle. They threw out phony excuses for doing this, such as saving money and cutting down on fraud. The real reason, of course, is that they thought that by shortening the amount of time to vote it would hurt Democrats. It didn't, but it did cause mass confusion.

Florida once again became a national laughingstock because huge lines taking hours to cast votes caused tabulation to take almost a week, long after the race had been called. The other issue was the incredibly long ballot filled with constitutional amendments, most of which were placed there by the Legislature.

Florida lawmakers limit citizens to 75 words for their ballot information on amendments, but they allowed themselves to use all the verbiage they wanted, making the ballots complex and difficult to understand. Some voters spent 45 minutes trying to figure out the amendments before voting.

The good news is that all but a couple of the amendments were soundly defeated. There's talk of limiting how many amendments can be on the ballot, and more importantly, how many the Legislature can place there. We hope that happens.

Floridians deserve better than what we received in 2012, and it appears like we're going to get it. Florida was the butt of thousands of election jokes for our state's frequent mishandling of elections. That has to stop and there's no excuse for it.