A discussion center for Democrats and their friends and neighbors in Miami-Dade County. Posts and comments may not reflect official thinking of the county Democratic Party. Democratic candidates are encouraged to apply for permission to post on this blog.
You can check results in your home precinct at this link, though you’ll need WinZip to unlock the statistics after you download them from the Miami-Dade Election Department. I chose to download the Excel version (marked as Details XLS) after finding the text version to be incomprehensible.
My home Precinct (lucky) 13 in the far northern and eastern blocks of Miami Beach: 2,168 registered voters, of whom 1,448 voted, a turnout rate of 67 percent, which is just what the county as a whole showed.
How about the Obama-McCain breakdown: 893 for Obama, 548 for McCain.
Those who voted absentee or early were 1,051, or 73.4 percent of the voting population.
My figures for Election Day are off by a few. I discovered late in the game that one of the columns for Election Day was for the very small number of people who voted by the Ivotronic touch-screen method rather than the optical scan fill-in-bubbles method. And I hadn’t included them in my total, as my Excel skills are pretty low.
MORE: The results for Congressional District 18 for Precinct 13 may show how (though not why) Annette Taddeo lost to Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, which I regret very much.
Totals: Taddeo 734, Ros-Lehtinen 617. It's a nice margin for the Democratic challenger but not nearly enough to offset the incumbent's totals in more-Republican precincts. Taddeo's total of 734 is well under Obama's 893.
Still, a tip o' the hat to Taddeo's visit to the voting site on Sunday, the last day of early voting, when she greeted hundreds of people waiting in line. They will remember her charm and intelligence for the next time.
About a year ago I was groaning about the poor turnout in Miami-Dade County municipal elections. What a turnabout!
Already in Florida we've got 37 percent of registered voters in the bank, with 2.6 million voting early and 1.6 million absentee. That's out of 11.2 million registered in the entire state.
Checking statistics at the Miami-Dade County Elections Department website, your blogger sees that some 63,000 absentee ballots in the county had not been returned as of Saturday. This is worrisome. Where are those ballots, anyway? There were 207,667 sent out, and only 144,296 returned.
If yours is among those unreturned, I believe you can hand it in on Election Day at any polling place -- without waiting in line. Deadline: 7 p.m.
Waiting five minutes or so on the phone at 3-1-1, your blogger asked how many polling places there are in the county. Answer: 764 -- way more than the 20 early-voting sites that were so packed. There are more precincts, because some precincts vote together with one or two others at the same place.
For the record, turnout was 16.7 percent in the county municipal elections a year ago. It's so much better to see enthusiastic turnout now for president and congress, plus all the ballot initiatives. It's a real puzzle why we have to separate the local and national elections. This isn't the way it's done in many places.
Annette Taddeo (in blue), Democratic challenger for U.S. House District 18, meets people in a long line waiting to vote at North Shore Branch Library in Miami Beach Sunday afternoon.
There was this headline on the Miami Herald's website, main page, saying "Early voting has closed." It was about 8 p.m. when I saw it. Then I called my friend Erika Brigham in the South Beach storefront of the Miami Beach Democratic Club. She asked around and was told that people were still voting at Miami Beach City Hall. Wow, that was three hours after the line closed.
The Herald was a little premature in the tense it chose for the verb in that Internet headline. Maybe the lines had closed, but voting was still at full throttle.
I hopped in my car and drove to the North Shore Branch Library, the other place where people can early-vote in Miami Beach, and the last people were soon to finish voting at about 8:45 p.m. Wow, these were people I saw getting on line just at 5 p.m. after I had spent most of the four-hour day there.
Then I called Michael Calderin, candidate for Florida House of Representatives in District 119, and he was still on line waiting to vote at the West Kendall Library on Hammocks Road and 102nd Avenue. He expected he might finish about 9:30 p.m. but couldn't be sure, as the line was snaking through rows of bookshelves. Wow, that would be 4 1/2 hours on line.
Will they be finished by midnight? It could be close. The longest wait time on Miamidade.gov was five hours at the Stephen P. Clark Government Center in downtown Miami. That was posted just before 5 p.m., so they most likely will be finishing around 10 p.m. Wow.
The early turnout is stunning. The crowds on Miami Beach were overwhelmingly pro-Obama, though some crazies came out from their caves with bizarre signs and shouts, so it's clear that Democrats won't get all the votes.
Michael Calderin said he'd seen tremendous lines at at least three early-vote sites on Sunday, and he thought almost half of the expected votes in his Florida House district had already been cast.
So I'm just saying, maybe Election Day won't be too crowded, if such a large number have voted already.
Check out this Huffington Post story on the visit of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick to Miami and the enthusiasm for early voting in the Miami Gardens suburb.
Hey, it's Halloween. You can expect unusual garb. In three hours at the North Shore Branch Library in Miami Beach, Collins Avenue at 75th, I only saw one voter in costume. She declined a slate card.
Earlier at least three genuine nuns went quietly in and gladly accepted Democratic Party slate cards.
Click on that Wednesday early afternoon and see, Great, wait times aren't so bad.
But why is it still taking four hours at the West Kendall Regional Library What's wrong at this spot?
(At first I read the wrong line and thought it was the West Dade Library with the problem. Sorry for the mistake and for pestering Michael Calderin, candidate for state representative in District 119, who was chatting with voters at that polling spot.)
I thought to do a post on early voting to feature the statistics from the first day. But, funny, early voting statistics are “coming soon,” it says on the Miami-Dade Elections Department site. Wonder why? Answer: pretty chaotic out there, right? People complaining of three or four hours waiting to vote – and this is still just early voting!?!
Before ripping into our election leaders, let’s pause for some statistics that are available: Absentee ballots. Yes, there are up-to-date statistics on this part of our method of voting. The Elections Department mailed out 144,515 ballots to people from Miami-Dade County, and as of Monday, 50,450 had been received back at Elections Department. That’s about a third already in the bank. Now, where are the rest of yous’ ballots?
You can check whether the ballot you put in the mail has been received at this web address:
Much of my day Monday was spent looking at TV news programs showing unpleasant scenes around the county and adjoining Broward with people in long waits to vote. Everywhere, people are wilting out in the boiling sun. I also got a phoned report of people getting soaked in the rain around midday at West Kendall Library. (Thank you, Michael Calderin.)
Why are we forced to hang out in these primitive conditions in order to vote? Roofs were invented long long ago specifically to protect elderly Floridians from the elements. We have roofs all over the place. Why don’t we vote there?
Beyond that, let’s be a little suspicious that quite a few of the problem areas with long lines were in Democratic-leaning areas such as Liberty City, where the voting site at the Caleb Center, the Model City Library, had dozens of people peeling off from an interminable wait; also at West Kendall, and Miami Beach City Hall.
I peeked at the early voting site near my North Beach home, the North Shore Branch Library on Collins Avenue at 75th Street on Miami Beach, and it was pretty calm about 9 a.m., with a dozen people waiting outside the building. There had been some modest problems getting started at 7 a.m., but not really a big deal.
It seemed to take 20 minutes or so for one person to vote. So let’s say 800,000 of our 1,243,315 registered voters actually go to do their civic duty. There’s 16 million minutes of voting behavior there, in Miami-Dade County alone. Awesome.
And what do people get at the end of that massive effort? Not confirmation of how they voted, but a note on the screen saying Thank You.
That, at any rate, was the dumbfounding impression reported by one of the first people to vote, Dave Doebler, who spent the night camped out at Miami Beach City Hall with his girlfriend, Dara Schoenwald, so they could be first to vote for Barack Obama.
They were so looking forward to a feeling of completion but the process did not include it.
“My problem is I don’t know what the machine interpreted. It’s a flawed process. There is a paper trail, and they can do a recount. But I have a real problem with no confirmation of how I voted,” Doebler said.
The previous system, the touch-screen voting method, didn’t have a paper trail, but at the end of the process, the screen showed how you had voted on each question, and if you were satisfied, you pushed the button to record the vote. Now you just get Thank You.
Doebler enumerated other issues. Some were mechanical, such as machines not being ready when the poll opened at 7 a.m. The script was rather small and he expected some elderly people with vision problems to find it difficult. (Remember the misaligned butterfly ballot in Palm Beach?) Then the two-page ballot also posed a problem, because when the voter feeds a completed page into the scanner, the machine prompts you to touch the Finish button. Ooops! If you haven’t fed both pages in, you’ll be starting over. That happened to one of Doebler’s friends.
His bottom line: “Nov. 4 is going to be a nightmare. People have to vote early. If they vote on election day, they might as well take the day off.”
Not all agreed. A voter getting into his car after voting at the North Shore Library said it all had gone smoothly and he had no complaints.
Here’s a link to the Miami Herald’s roundup of early voting: more machines being added, the election supervisor “explaining” that it’s a presidential year and people have to be patient. Oh, yeah? This sounds like a definition of bad government.
Dara Schoenwald and Dave Doebler lend new meaning to the phrase "opposites attract." Schoenwald, 32, is petite, red-headed cultural anthropologist for an advertising agency. Among her passions are outdoor music festivals, dancing barefoot, and participating in the emerging local arts scene. Doebler, 36, is a 6-foot-3 software sales executive. He enjoys reading, barbecueing, and rare, fine wines.
However, Schoenwald and Doebler agree on their pick for the upcoming presidential election. In fact, the couple has made a pact to camp outside the steps of the Miami Beach City Hall Sunday night Oct. 19, in hopes that they will be the first Floridians to cast their votes for Obama, when the early voting polls open on 7a.m. Monday.
"I don't want to wait until November 4th," says Doebler. "By voting early, we get to beat the long lines. Also, we are already taking Election Day off from work to volunteer by driving people to the polls. We are very excited to be the first ones in Florida to pull the lever for Senator Obama."
Schoenwald credits the Obama campaign for producing a groundswell of support in South Florida, especially among young people. "I believe in Obama's message of change for our country." says Schoenwald. "No other presidential election has excited me as much as this one. After eight years of Bush in the White House, I think South Florida is ready for a switch to more progressive and informed governance."
Among the items that Schoenwald and Doebler plan to pack for their overnight stay: a sturdy tent, a sleeping bag for two, bug spray, and their iPods, which will feature official campaign music "Yes We Can: Voices of a Grassroots Movement."
Miami Beach residents are encouraged to join the couple, in order to demonstrate community support and unity for this groundbreaking presidential election. To participate, contact Dara Schoenwald at dara_s@yahoo.com.
And if you are voting by absentee ballot, here's the place to check the status of your ballot -- whether it's been mailed to you, received back in the Elections Department.
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 4th Q-and-A we read “The Democratic National Committee made Florida forfeit all of its delegates to the nominating convention.”
The 6th 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 16th 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.
Alex Sink @ Fundraiser in Little Havana (click on photo to get slide show)
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