September 12, 2002


REMEMBER THIS ONE
"What is it with Democrats having a hard time voting - I don't know." - banana republic Florida gov. Jeb Bush.

The real story:
People waited from 20 minutes up to 5 hours for the new voting machines to warm up.

By 9 a.m., 68 of Miami-Dade's polling stations still had not opened.

Poll workers elsewhere in Miami-Dade and Broward counties struggled to get precincts open on time and the new touch screen voting machines running, frustrating scores of other voters.

Jebbie ordered polls across the state to stay open an extra two hours Tuesday night but several dozen precincts in Broward defiantly closed well before 9 p.m.

Election workers in Orlando said 42 percent of Orange County's ballots would have to be counted by hand after polls closed. The ballots were tearing as they were fed through optical scanning machines, making them unreadable.

In Duval County, a downtown Jacksonville polling place opened 90 minutes late because poll workers didn't turn on the machines in time.

In some Broward precincts, the computer screen for the governor's race did not come up.

In the Broward city of Dania Beach, meanwhile, poll workers shut the doors at one polling place while they struggled to get their touch screen machines started. Still unable to get them up by 8:30 a.m., they opened the doors and allowed people in the overwhelmingly Democratic precinct to vote on paper ballots. They all received ballots for the Republican primary.




No comments: