Absentee Ballot Count Over in Miami-Dade, press conf link:

[The Straight Story]

http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/Miami-Dade-Still-Counting-Ballots-Thursday-177834791.html
(live video feed there)


Over a day and a half after the 2012 Election ended, the counting of absentee ballots in Miami-Dade finally finished Thursday morning, Elections Department officials said.

Officials announced around noon that all of the absentee ballots had been processed. Workers will start processing provisional ballots Friday.

As of 9 a.m., around 500 absentee ballots still had to be counted at the elections department's headquarters in Doral, county Supervisor of Elections Penelope Townsley said.

"This is simply a matter of sheer volume, we're dealing with a tremendous amount of paper," Townsley said Thursday. "We have done everything we could possibly do to prepare, again, it's the volume and we're managing it very effectively. We will not rush this process, we will make sure that every vote is counted."

Workers had been counting the ballots non-stop since polls closed at 7 p.m. Tuesday. Absentee ballots take longer to process than when residents vote in person and go through several verification levels before they make it to a scanner.

[Webster Green]

1. Fucking Floriduh!

I wonder if we will ever get the final count from our little banana republic.

[NV Whino]

2. I wonder if they ever thought to get a head start on the absentee ballots

Naw, that's too easy. And besides they probably don't even count them if one of the candidates gets a true majority. Saves money, dontcha know.

[longship]

3. AFAIK, they can only start counting when pollls are closed.

Otherwise, there could be leaks, chances for corruption, etc. No votes are counted until all the votes are in.

But I agree that FL and OH are a dark stain on our country's election process.

We need to do something about this on the federal level. And boy, are the Republicans going to scream bloody murder.

[NV Whino]

4. Absentee ballots are on the rise, it seems to me

We need to make provisions for that such as counting them as they come in. Results should not be available until polls close, but get 'em counted awready.

We also need to unify national election laws.

Everybody has same number of early voting days.
Same voting hours.
Same type of ballots. (Remember Florida's butterfly ballot disaster?)
Electronic voting must have a verifiable paper receipt.
Election Day is a holiday.

[SammyWinstonJack]

5. Election Day registration, too.

[longship]

6. No early counting.

That would break ballot security.

WA and OR do their entire electorate by mail and they have no trouble getting it counted in a timely manner.

FL is just screwed up. OH, too.

[csziggy]

7. A LOT of people have told me they are voting absentee

Rather than use electronic voting machines. I like the optical scanners in our county (Leon, Florida) because we have paper ballots that can be counted for verification but the scanners expedite the original counts. (Even though our Supervisor of Elections participated in demonstrations of how those optical scanners can be hacked!)

Of course, no form of voting is valid unless you can trust and verify the people who control the ballots or machines AND verify the machines and software used..

We should have a minimum of two weeks of early voting, minimum of 12 hours a day. A three day Election Weekend with voting 24 hours a day for all three days. MANDATORY time off from every employer for voting sometime during the early and regular voting period.

[SidDithers]

8. Maybe not having a 12 page ballot would speed things up...nt

Sid

[Tarheel_Dem]

9. Yeah, well that's what happens when you load up a ballot with a gazillion ballot measures. It's....

ridiculous, and it's suppressive.