NY Times looks at FL early voting

The Sunday NY Times has a good rundown of the impact of early voting in Florida this year.

Summary: about 350,000 Democrats did it, and so did about 400,000 Republicans. My conclusion (not the NY Times’): We will have to work hard on this for the November general election. The Republicans still are very good at this important aspect of Get Out The Vote. There are more registered Democrats than Republicans in Florida, and we ought to be ahead in early voting.

It’s interesting that we early-voting Dems in Florida already outnumber all the Democrats who voted in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. Same for the Republicans. This may not be surprising now, but cast your frame of mind back to before the Iowa caucuses. Were you certain that voting would be heavy? Well, now we are getting used to the idea that our supposedly reluctant voters may actually be inspired – by the candidates, by the war, by the economy – and vote.

And by the way, I just checked and my absentee ballot has been received back at the Miami-Dade Elections Department. Check by logging on to www.miamidade.gov/elections, on the left-hand menu click on Absentee voting, and when prompted enter your zip code and date of birth. Voila.

One point of the Times’ article is that unofficial grass-roots campaigning by backers of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton may have boosted the number of early Democrats who voted. Darn, if it hadn’t been for my walking pneumonia, maybe I’d have gotten John Edwards mentioned in that sentence, too. We have been in the Miami Herald and expect to be in there again Tuesday morning.

One of the Times subheads says, “Democrats are turning out despite penalties by the national committee.”

Now I’d like to contrast that with the way the Sunday Miami Herald covered most of two pages with large-type Q-and-A about the early primary. Did any of this explain that the eventual nominee would seat the delegates?

• In the 4^th Q-and-A we read “The Democratic National Committee made Florida forfeit all of its delegates to the nominating convention.”
• The 6^th Q-and-A : “So does this mean Democratic votes won’t count?” “Yes and no.” The votes will be counted and reported. “However the results will not translated into delegates to the nominating convention. So on paper, Florida’s results won’t put the top vote-getter any closer to the nomination.”
• The 16^th Q-and-A: “Will Florida send delegates to the conventions anyway?” “Both state parties plan to send full slates of delegates to the nominating conventions in August and September. Party leaders say they expect the presumptive nominees to pressure party leaders to include the nation’s largest battleground state.”

In other words, readers of the Miami Herald have to be highly persistent to get even a hint that their delegates will be seated at the convention.

I’ll soon get discouraged and give up trying to convince the Herald otherwise. Best I’ve done so far is to get one of them to deny they ever wrote that our votes won’t count.