I Voted
I assume that Floridians remembered that today was the regular Florida primary, and went to the polls. There’s only about an hour left in the Eastern zone and two hours left in the Central zone if you didn’t.
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11 comments
I’m temping at our local County elections office. I’ve worked the Presidential Primary in February…the State Primary in June….will be working the Presidential General in November…and it is looking like we’ll be having a special election in March if the do-do’s in Tomato Town don’t do something about a freakin’ budget.
Guess the pols don’t think that running elections cost money. Oh, yeah, and because our County is running in the red, it’s basically shutting down for two weeks in December giving almost everyone an unpaid furlow. Not going to work if there’s another election in early 2009.
democratic primaries in two races! school board and sheriff. it’s practically an embarrassment of riches.
when i didn’t get around to re-registering as independent after the january kerfuffle, i decided to wait until after the local races, just in case. got to encourage people to run for local offices.
and now, since it’s the middle of the convention, i’ll wait and see if the democrats do anything spectacular, like change the platform to full-on support of single-payer national health insurance, that deserves my continued support, meager though that support may be. i’m not expecting them to, mind you, but what’s a few more days?
we have all new machines and ballot designs. just when i was getting used to the old ones.
Yes, but it is one vote? Or half a vote? :*
OT: Jill, you might be interested in this story: Bayer on defensive in bee deaths. It’s about a suspected link between chlothianidine, the active ingredient in Bayer’s Poncho pesticides, and the death of honey bees throughout the world.
Jill, everyone knows that all you have to do is cut out the “fat” and governments will be free. There’s no need for taxes. 😈
Hipparchia, I got to vote in the Republican races that will decide the office, because there are no Democrats running for anything over here. There were three races in which there are no write-in candidates, so everyone gets to vote.
The only thing new was they swapped the sides of the town hall for the two precincts that vote there. My precinct has been on the North end since I move here, but this time it was on the South.
This is the normal Florida primary, Moi, and has been held on the last Tuesday in August since I moved back. The Presidential primary and local elections, is the one they moved, adding more work and more cost to the county.
for a number of years now i’ve voted in a number of republican primaries, simply because there were no democrats anywhere to be found.
there weren’t any republican primaries for me to vote in today, meaning that each race has at least one dem challenger in the upcoming general, PLUS there were two races with more than one democrat! two democrats running for sheriff, three democrats running for the school board seat. it’s quite a sea change.
of course, now there’s this pesky little question of whether or not the democratic party/ies will recognize all this as the people saying we really do want some changes made around here.
Surely you jest, Hipparchia. Change is something to hope for, not receive.
I got to vote for Sheriff, a county commissioner, and the Supervisor of Elections.
Supervisor of Elections was easy, because the current Supervisor’s deputy was running, and out elections have always been run smoothly and efficiently.
In the county commission race, the incumbent works full-time for a local jurisdiction, and that is a conflict of interest to my mind. The second thinks we can ignore things or privatize. The third wants to actually analyze the problems and develop strategies to solve them.
The current Sheriff thinks dressing deputies like ninjas and giving them automatic weapons is a good idea. The second candidate thinks we should be doing something about illegal immigrants. The third is a retired Air Force Security Policeman who thinks that law enforcement and security should be the first priorities of the Sheriff’s Department.
I feel confident that only my choice for Supervisor of Elections will win, and the incumbents will win in the other races, but I voted anyway.
change is something you can finagle out of a coke machine if you do it right, but seriously, i was a tiny bit disappointed that i didn’t get to vote in a single republican primary. probably none of the incumbents will get thrown out of office come the next election, but cookies to all those paid their qualifying fees.
besides, i got to vote for a black woman today. woo hoo! not that this is completely unheard of here, but it’s still great to see it happening.
glad to learn that about your sheriff. i’ll make sure all my road trips are to the west now. my various, uh, encounters with the fhp, whether because i was driving a bit too fast or stuck on the side of the road because i forgot to look at the gas guage, have all gone well, but the ones with more local forces, not so much.
I know a lot of them, and I certainly wouldn’t have hired them. The other problem is that they use a lot of volunteers who look just like the regular deputies and carry guns. That is a bad idea, but they keep calling up local deputies with the National Guard.
Thanks for the Bee News. I love my little bumbly buzzy ones.
Gee…if they wanted to cut the fat out of the budget….they could start with some of these portly politicos. They should stop hanging out in restaurants with lobbyists.
We gotta get rid of this stupid 2/3 thing. The minority party always throws monkey wrenches into the process…and folks don’t deal with reality of things. Not everything is rosy and not everyone is able to financially deal with disaster…not every County can pay for clean up and fighting fire…after fire….after fire.
volunteers, with guns. ojoy. do they volunteer because they get to carry guns?
It’s amazing, Jill, that Arnold didn’t know that obstruction by Republicans was the problem in the California budget, and that not even a Republican governor can stop it. The Republicans don’t want the government to work, it’s that simple.
It is the same scenario as when I lived in California, but times were better, so the system could tolerate it. In tough times people can’t afford to wait for payment.
The banks don’t really have the assets to extend interest free loans to people while politicians make up their mind. Even in the old days when one of these impasses happened the banks charged businesses interest on state vouchers while they honored paychecks. Small businesses went bankrupt as they lost money dealing with state contracts.
Hipparchia, this is Florida, everyone gets to carry a gun.