Florida Political News

The Miami Herald had a couple of nice pieces on politics in the state:

First was Charley’s hope to stop all those angry people yelling at him: Florida’s early voting hours are extended

Some said the long lines were due, in part, to the bill signed by Gov. Jeb Bush that not only limited early voting to eight hours a weekday, but limited those sites to libraries, city halls and voting headquarters.

The result has been packed rooms throughout South Florida that in some cases fit only a half dozen voting machines.

Republicans said they pushed the bill after complaints from constituents who voted in places of worship and to keep elections costs in line.

Republicans complaining about voting in church halls? Pull the other one, it has bells on. Everyone knows it was voter suppression, plain and simple. Apparently they forgot that Republicans also vote.

Volusia County [Daytona Beach] had problems coming up with people to cover the new hours, but finally managed to do it. Still no word about the state funding this change.

Locally, the early voting sites will be open 7am to 7pm on Saturday, but not on Sunday.

The other piece was about our junior Senator, Sen. Mel Martinez to pay $99,000 election fine

Martinez said in a statement he was “delighted” the matter has been settled, and that his campaign took steps to avoid a repeat occurance as soon as the errors were discovered.

Ben Ginsberg, a partner at Patton Boggs, the law firm representing the campaign, said Martinez’s campaign “brought in a large amount of resources in a very short period of time and accounting mistakes were made.”

The violations occured during the Orlando Republican’s 2004 run for election, when he narrowly defeated Democrat Betty Castor in a bruising campaign.

In all, Martinez for Senate received more than $313,000 in excessive contributions from 186 contributors, according to the FEC. Federal law at the time capped individuals from giving more than $2,000.

It’s so difficult to track, $2,000 was such an odd number. I guess no one knew that there were computer programs that do this sort of thing automatically to prevent these little problems with the memories of 186 people.  An average mistake of $1,682.80 could happen to anyone. 😈

[They need a spell checker or to stop using any form of “occur”, and to start using the standard quotes.]