Intentional Ignorance

The Local Puppy Trainer has a standard piece of misinformation from the President of the Florida Senate: Groups press for election reform in Florida

“There are places in the state that obviously had severe problems, but I question whether 67 counties need to be reformed,” he said. “The last thing we need is more micromanagement by the state.”

Gaetz said he would be interested to see whether the “left-leaning” League of Women Voters would offer any criticism at its press conference of Susan Bucher, the former Democratic state representative now serving as the supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County.

“I would think the people in Palm Beach County would be terribly embarrassed by their supervisor of elections,” Gaetz said. “Just because Susan Bucher can’t count votes, there’s no reason why (Okaloosa Supervisor of Elections) Paul Lux needs to be micromanaged.”

Don Gaetz is my state Senator and he knows full well and good that the problems have nothing to with ‘micromanagement’, but are a result of the changes that the Republicans in the legislature made in the election laws, changes he voted for.

The misogynist attack on the League of Women Voters and Susan Bucher doesn’t change the fact that the legislature reduced the number of early voting days from 14 to 8, despite the fact that the two previous governors extended early voting because the 14 days wasn’t sufficient to meet the needs of voters. The complaints aren’t about counting the votes, they are about being able to vote, and Gaetz knows it.

Paul Lux dealt with 128,885 registered voters of whom 95,193 voted on a 4-page ballot. Susan Bucher dealt with 810,186 registered voters of whom 559,136 voted on a 6-page ballot. It doesn’t take much math to see that voters in Palm Beach took 50% longer to vote than those in Okaloosa, or that it takes less time to count the votes in Okaloosa than in Palm Beach.

It’s nice to see that the Republicans are announcing at the beginning that they have no intention of admitting they screwed things up, and certainly don’t intend to fix them. This makes it a lot easier to convince voters to get rid of them in 2014.