Please Note
I would personally appreciate it if the media and the Florida Secretary of State would remember that from the Apalachicola River west to the Perdido River is the Central Time Zone in the state of Florida. The polls don’t close in West Florida until 7PM Central Standard Time, which is 8PM Eastern Standard Time.
In past years the Secretary of State has started to announce election results before our polls closed, and that is really tacky as well as slightly illegal.
Florida has 11,247,634 registered voters and 4,272,280 have already voted early or returned their absentee ballots. Hopefully this will reduce lines tomorrow, but there are no guarantees. There will be many more polling places open tomorrow, and the ballots don’t have to be printed, as in early voting, so things should be faster. If you are watching the returns, don’t make assumptions based on early results. The first results will be from early voting, and significantly more Democrats than Republicans used that option, so it will probably skew the early results.
8 comments
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Geez, not already. It was even listed as a reason for the 2000 mess.
Only a 30 minute wait this morning. And yes, the winner will be declared before the polls close here. Aren’t you used to it by now?
Only about 12 hours to go.
Obama ’08
I wouldn’t care if there weren’t so many amendments on the ballot. If people don’t vote we could get stuck with even worse amendments that last January’s. I wish more people would pay attention to what these really do to them, instead of deciding it’s too much trouble.
I’ll give the media a semi-pass, but the Florida government keeps forgetting about the Central Time Zone when it schedules things, and that’s just annoying. It may be time to raise the “bonnie blue flag” and have another Republic of West Florida.
Maybe you need an amendment to put the entire state in one time zone. 😐
Ok, just kidding, sort of. But seriously, that does make for confusion.
The Apalachicola River becomes the Chattahoochee River north of the Florida border and is the border between Georgia and Alabama. Georgia is EST and Alabama is CST, so Florida is in line with its neighboring states.
It’s not like this is something new, or it has never been mentioned.
I remember as a wee little lass (9 years old) my parents complaining about them calling Florida before the polls were closed in NW Florida in the ’76 election.
I’ve had people from the midwest argue with me about what time zone I live in!
I would hate to be on EST.
Can we create our own state? This section would be REALLY red.
We were once, for a very short time, a separate country, the Republic of West Florida, from the Mississippi over, with the current northern boundary of West Florida extending west, but Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana got annoyed and put an end to it.
The blue flag with a single white star was the flag of the Republic. It was the height of hypocrisy for the Confederate states to start using “Bonnie Blue Flag” as one of their songs, considering they are the ones that insisted on the end of the Republic.
Oh, yes, it would probably be “Red”, but those are the breaks in politics.