The Numbers
The Division of Elections says there are 10,203,112 registered voters in Florida. In that number, 4,137,067 [40.55%] are registered as Democrats, and 3,825,727 [37.50%] as Republicans.
In the election, 4,239,350 [41.55%] voters showed up to cast a ballot.
For the Republican primary, 1,924,346 [50.30% of those registered] voted, while in the Democratic primary, 1,734,456 [41.92%] voted, for a total of 3,658,802 Presidential primary voters.
On the question of Amendment 1, the so-called tax cut, 4,132,687 people voted 2,648,956 [64.10%] for the amendment, and 1,483,731 [35.90%] against, so it is now part of the Florida constitution.
3 comments
By now, the Texas constitution is effectively mostly legislation. So many merely practical (or impractical) changes necessitate amendments that the notion of a fundamental document underpinning our government has simply vanished under the weight of the details. Every two years we vote on literally dozens of amendments; I get through it by reading a biennial post by my former Democratic State Rep., containing pro and con arguments on each amendment. It’s a helluva way to run a government. Texas actually called a legislative constitutional convention back in the mid-Seventies to attempt to produce a more cogent document; after a very, very, very long time, the convention gave up, having produced… nothing.
The short version: I am sympathetic, not only to the position you have taken on your Amendment 1, but to the whole problem of ballot propositions. Direct democracy is sometimes subject to abuse, and this looks to me like one of those times.
(OT: DNS to your site frequently fails tonight. Every comment requires at least a couple of attempts to post.)
OT: I’m have the same problem with YDD and contacted NFS. Their guess is my ISP. Most of the people having the problem seem to be on DSL through their local telco. I’m going to attempt a service call, but Dog knows what I get from that.
They are doing the same thing to the Florida constitution, but we have a regular view to clean things up. They at least raised the threshold from a simple majority to 60%, that should stop some of the abuses. They did schedule this one for the primary looking for a low turnout election.