Note that the 49,000 number seems to be an upper bound.
Like Jordan, as many as 49,000 people across Central Florida were discouraged from voting because of long lines on Election Day, according to a researcher at Ohio State University who analyzed election data compiled by the Orlando Sentinel.
About 30,000 of those discouraged voters — most of them in Orange and Osceola counties — likely would have backed Democratic President Barack Obama, according to Theodore Allen, an associate professor of industrial engineering at OSU.
About 19,000 voters would have likely backed Republican Mitt Romney, Allen said.
This suggests that Obama’s margin over Romney in Florida could have been roughly 11,000 votes higher than it was, based just on Central Florida results. Obama carried the state by 74,309 votes out of more than 8.4 million cast. […]
Democratic activists such as Orlando’s David Rucker said he saw a fierce devotion among voters to weather long lines to counter efforts by Republicans to limit early voting.
“They had to stay in those lines,” Rucker said.
But many Central Florida voters faced unyielding work schedules, child-care issues or other demands. They could not wait out lines that sometimes stretched around blocks.
So does this matter? That all depends on if you think there’s a chance that an election in Florida could come down to a margin of 11,000 voters or less.
Another article speculates about what made the areas with the worst lines different. One major cause seems to be Florida’s overly difficult process for casting provisional ballots when someone has moved. Each provisional ballot, in that circumstance, apparently requires its own phone call to the supervisor of elections, slowing lines to a crawl. Of course, lower-income voters and college students – both of whom trend Democratic – are more likely to have moved recently. It’s not plausible that the Republicans who rewrote the provisional ballot regulations in 2011 were unaware of the partisan benefit of their new law.
There are a lot of reforms that can make the lines move faster – but we all know that the GOP will do everything it can to block those reforms, because they want to win the next election that’s decided by less than 11,000 votes.
For that reason, the most important reform would be to move the detailed rule-making out of the hands of politicians and into the hands of an appointed expert committee (perhaps made of retired judges appointed by both parties). The conflict of interest involved in having elected politicians set the rules is too large.
If those numbers are roughly accurate, I believe there must have been state and local elections whose results were changed.
Florida is a state where you can vote absentee simply by asking to.
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voting/absentee.shtml
49,000 out of 8,400,000 is 0.5% of the votes cast; a thin shell of a thin shell.
Long voting lines are caused by local organizations that do a poor job of setting up the precincts, or by counties that don’t spend enough money or time on training election officials. They are not caused by phone calls to the supervisor of elections; the line doesn’t have to stop moving for that phone call, if people aren’t being stupid. Long lines are generally the fault of localities; localities are generally in the hands of the parties that control there. If 2/3 of the discouraged voters came from Democrats, then 2/3 of the county organizations were run by same.
In short, correctable, trivial problems the blame for which does not lie where you think it does.
Legitimate voters should be able to vote! I don’t know what the cause of the long lines were, but the Florida SoS should address the issue in time for the next set of elections.
As far as provisional ballots and recently moved voters – if you value getting your mail, you make sure the Post Office and the people who send you mail know your address has changed. If Florida law is anything like Illinois law, you have 60 days after you move to get your drivers’ licenses’ address changed. In other words, when you move you have to do a number of things to make sure that important things in your life and the law continue. Voting is just one more of those things. Deal with it or suffer the consequences. It shouldn’t be made any more difficult than it has to be, but it also should be made any less difficult to the point that the integrity of the electoral process is compromised.
From the article:
Attributing longer-than-usual voting lines to a 6-page ballot (apparently longer than usual, with 11 Constitutional amendments proposed) and a higher than expected turnout would seem to make sense. I note that all that’s cited for state rules about address changes are “indications”, with no further explanation. Hard to give that a lot of credibility without any further information.
Getting more machines, etc. to the sites makes sense. As far as the rest – when I started voting in the 1971 primaries there were no such things as mail-in ballots and early voting days and absentee ballots had to be applied for in person and justified. Have creating these things increased voter participation? Or have they just spread out the voting of people who would have voted anyway?
I have argued before in this space that it makes a lot more sense to me to do voting on a Saturday or Sunday, when the percentage of potential voters who have to work is lower than on a Tuesday. I propose that it would spread out voting throughout the day instead of bunching it up in two peaks before and after the standard work day.
@Robert (and the OP), 46,000 may be the upper threshold and only 0.5% of the Florida vote, but it was also an estimate of only 2 counties out of 67 here in Florida.
I can assure you the lines were just as ridiculously long in the very populous counties of South Florida, including Miami Dade and Broward.
I don’t care if there are hoops some voters could jump through ahead of time to get an absentee ballot. Voting is the most fundamental of rights. We should not have to employ workaround strategies in order to exercise this right. Also, it was clear that the Republicans in the state legislature were intentionally trying to suppress turnout.
Hilary, what’s your source for the claim that this was only 2 counties? The linked article says these two counties were the worst hit, but talks about many others.
I don’t disagree that voting is a fundamental right. I disagree with Amp (and you) focusing primarily or solely on “Republicans in the legislature” as the causal agent of the problems. Republican efforts to suppress turnout, for one thing, would not result in long lines in polling places. There may be some blame to place on the legislature, but there is a lot of responsibility for the process distributed downwards in the political structure, and a lot of Democrats running a lot of those places. “The Republicans did it!!!” is not an enormously plausible explanation when it is the only thing cited, in a state that’s 51% Democrat.
If, for argument’s sake, Republicans had made efforts to suppress turnout by making it harder to vote, leading to longer lines, would you actually object to that practice? Do you think that’s a legitimate way to try and win close elections?
The decision to radically shorten early-voting days was a conscious decision, made by Republicans, in order to make it harder to vote. (Early voters in Florida are mostly Democrats). In counties where many voters use early voting, fewer early voting days leads to longer lines on the days people are allowed to vote.
From the Palm Beach Post:
Greer, it should be noted, is currently on the outs with the Florida GOP, which has accused him of using GOP funds in unauthorized manners.
Charlie Crist, the former Republican governor of Florida who has left the GOP:
And folks who are currently with the GOP:
Note that cutting early voting was the tactic that succeeded, but it certainly wasn’t the only tactic the Florida GOP tried:
I think you’d have to be extraordinary naive to believe that the Florida GOP wasn’t engaged in a deliberate campaign of making it harder to vote in ways that disproportionately effected Democrats.
As you said, there are other factors at work as well. But I think those factors will be easier to address (although incompetence, like bubbles under the wallpaper, will always be with us), because the people trying to solve the problem genuinely want to solve the problem.
As long as the GOP is run by racists with no commitment to or love for Democracy, however, then that creates a different problem; not a matter of incompetency, but a matter of malice. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to criticize that in particular.
Argh, my comment got eaten!!
The article clearly states only central Florida voters were taken into account. South Florida is by far the most populous and most Democratic part of Florida. Reports during and after the voting overwhelmingly state that Broward county, home to Ft. Lauderdale and the district of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was the hardest hit, with 7 hour wait times being common. Miami-Dade came in close second.
Any discussion with qualifiers that 46,000 is an upper threshold or that this is less than 1% of the total voters in ALL of Florida should also include that this analysis does NOT include the most populous, most Democratic, and most affected portion of Florida.
The OP did a good job linking to sources about conscious African Anerican voter suppression here, but we are not just playing partisan games and saying “it was the Republicans!!” and pointing fingers. There was an organized campaign, flying in the face of a recent history of long lines and well known voting irregularities in Florida, to cut early voting and specifically target urban, populous, liberal areas with higher populations of African Americans by white Republican legislators from lesser populated, whiter, more conservative counties.
Here is a Republican insider discussing this:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/ex-republicans-claim-fla-gop-suppressed-democratic-vote-194121956–election.html
“The article clearly states only central Florida voters were taken into account.”
OK, where?
As for early voting, you can’t have it both ways. Early voting is like absentee voting; if you’re going to characterize them as “tricks” then you can’t dismiss the wide availability of one while complaining of restrictions on the latter.
If, for argument’s sake, Republicans had made efforts to suppress turnout by making it harder to vote, leading to longer lines, would you actually object to that practice?
Depends. What was done to make it harder to vote?
So you’re OK with suppressing turnout as long as it’s done correctly?
I’m not answering any beating-your-wife questions. What was done to make voting harder? I can see answers to that that I would think were a-ok, and answers that I would think monstrous. Tell me what was done, rather than your characterization of the intent behind it, and I’ll tell you what I think of it.
“This suggests that Obama’s margin over Romney in Florida could have been roughly 11,000 votes higher than it was, based just on Central Florida results.”
“His analysis of Central Florida results compared precinct closing times, Election Day turnout and results in the presidential race — which attracted the highest vote totals of any race on the ballot — for all Lake, Orange, Osceola and Seminole county precincts.”
Are you being intentionally obtuse?
Neither of those support “he looked at only two counties”. What he looked at, exactly, appears to be somewhat obscure.
This is pretty weak Robert. Republicans have solid control over the state government of Florida, which is what is relevant in terms of setting elections policy, not the vote total in the presidential election.
Robert, the article lists the four counties he looked at. They are all in Central Florida, which you asked me to prove.
You and your arguments are a waste of time.
I appreciate the point you made, and agree that you’re making a better case than Robert. However, please don’t make comments which are directly insulting to other comment-writers here, when you post on this blog.
(I wouldn’t have objected if you’d just said that “your arguments are a waste of time,” but the “you and” makes it a statement about Robert as a person, rather than just a statement about his argument.)
Hilary said it was 2 counties. I asked for a cite on that. She responded that it was clear. I asked where it was clearly stated. She hasn’t responded.
You then came in and quoted sections of the article that talked about Central Florida and 3 counties. I noted that neither of those support Hilary’s claim. You then responded again with a statement about 4 counties.
Does anyone have a link to the actual scholarly work that was done? None of the defenders of its narrow scope seem to be able to state what its scope was consistently, or to cite supporting material from the article that consistently buttress their point.
I’m not answering any beating-your-wife questions.
Well, I guess that’s easy enough to do if you define beating-your-wife questions as “anything I can’t cleverly evade.”
The question wasn’t, do you agree with anything that makes voting harder; it was whether you would agree if lines were longer because of voter suppression efforts. Not everything that slows down voting or makes voting more difficult is actually an attempt to suppress the vote. The question was only about the latter.
If the status quo is that everyone capable of getting through the door can vote, then saying “wait, you gotta be on the voter roll” is a voter suppression effort.
Standing outside the black neighborhood with a posse armed with shotguns and shaking your head whenever someone comes outside is a voter suppression effort.
I didn’t say I’d evade any question on the topic; I said, tell me what the “voter suppression effort” is, and I’ll tell you whether I’m OK with it. Whether it makes lines longer or shorter is, or may be, immaterial. Suddenly making the voter roll relevant may make lines longer. Suddenly suppressing the Klan and letting blacks get to the polls may make lines longer. I don’t care much about the lines; I care about what got done.
What got done?
Actually, Robert, it went like this:
Q: If, for argument’s sake, Republicans had made efforts to suppress turnout by making it harder to vote, leading to longer lines, would you actually object to that practice?
A: Depends. What was done to make it harder to vote?
Right. What was done to make it harder to vote? More broadly, for whom was it made harder to vote? Five-time convicted felons? People with fake IDs? Civil rights heroes? Ordinary people?
“efforts to suppress turnout by making it harder to vote” is not a neutral phrase. It could be deployed neutrally by someone writing in good faith, or it could mean “efforts to keep child rapists from being able to vote”. Thus, my reluctance to answer until there is clarity about what is being asked. What, specifically, was done to “suppress turnout”, by making it harder to vote, for whom?
Suppression of turnout by sending mailers to particular voters telling them the wrong day for the election? Awful. I oppose it. Suppression of turnout by double-checking the felon list (I think Florida is a no-votes-for-felons state, I could be wrong)? Doesn’t bother me a bit. Suppression of turnout by eliminating the absentee ballot? Apalling (and forbidden by Federal law), I’m agin’ it. Suppression of turnout by reducing early voting days? Kind of depends. How many days were there before, how many days were there after, how many votes were turned in on the early days that did happen? (I’m not a big fan of early voting, but I’m not implacably opposed to it either.)
What was the actual change or changes made, that “suppressed” the vote? I need that information, not the characterization of someone with very different political values than I have, before I can say aye or nay to the question.
Since, like “what citation supports what you’re saying?”, this question seems impossibly difficult to answer, I’ll go out on a limb in the interest of interlocutory harmony. The big thing that people have mentioned repeatedly seems to be a drastic reduction of early voting. Well, that would be a legislative act, so my go-to defense of “blame the county” wouldn’t apply – so what happened with early voting in Florida? I honestly don’t know, as I type this. Going to Google it to find out. Here we go. Working without a net here, people.
OK. The Republicans reduced early voting from 14 days, to 8 days, prior to the election. OK, 8 certainly is less than 14. Does it constitute voter suppression? (If there had been 365 days of early voting, and it was reduced to 364, is that suppression?) What did other states do? Well, not all early voting is in-person. Here’s a lovely map showing the early voting rules nationwide: http://www.270towin.com/early-voting-2012-election/
Huh. Odd. Florida, despite this move to a mere nine days where you can go to the polls in person, seems pretty typical among the states. In fact, looking at the map at the “Republican L” of right-leaning states…I don’t see any evident pattern at all, unless it is a weak correlation between early voting and Republicanosity. Odd.
But OK – every state is its own unique flower, and all that. Maybe the 8 days in Florida, broadly in tune with the national trend though they are, ended up being inadequate. Maybe not many people were able to…hang on, getting a telegraph here from one of the field agents I dispatched to blanket the nation. Well, wouldja look at this: http://elections.gmu.edu/early_vote_2012.html
Seems that as a percentage of the 2008 vote, the 2012 early vote in Florida was 52.9% of the vote. If my scan of the columns is correct, this puts Florida at the state where the early vote was the 5th largest on that statistic – most of the top 4 were just a smidgen higher, Nevada was around 77%. (Because hey, Nevada. Once you play the slots, what else is there to do? Might as well vote and go home.)
Wow, so more than half of the votes in Florida were early votes? That’s some voter-suppressing machine those clever Republicans have running, there. BUT WAIT! In 2008, the Florida early-vote-as-%-of-previous election was 54%! Damn those elephantine geniuses, they knocked the vote down a whole percentage point by reducing the vote period…except darn it. The US as a whole went from 30.6% in 2008, to 24.5% in 2012. As the nation trended downwards by almost 1 vote in 6, Florida trended down by…1 vote in 25. Huh. Compared to the nationwide trend, Florida ADDED early votes.
Now, I have known some idiot Republicans in my day. Even been one myself. But I have yet to meet the Republican who would think that getting more than half the electorate out in the early vote, and strongly bucking the nationwide trend for a reduction in the early vote, constitutes using the early vote as a suppression tool.
So, let me turn off the Oh My God How Can One Person Be That Big Of A Smartass Jackass filter for a minute to sum up:
The thing everyone here talks about as being a voter suppression effort, either misfired spectacularly or wasn’t a sincerely-intended suppression effort. Any schoolteacher can tell you that once you allow a reasonable period for an assignnment, adding a day or a week or a month to the deadline won’t help many extra students across the finish line. The kids who will be able to do it in two weeks, will be the same set who will get it done in a month, if two weeks was reasonable. Any-old-time absentee balloting, and nine days when you can access a physical ballot box should you prefer, is a reasonable time frame. It is marginally possible that there are a handful of people who were just totally slammed for those nine specific days, but could have voted if they’d had that extra six days at the beginning; it is 100% true that those folks had plenty of time to get absentee ballots and vote anyway, and could do so by mail up to about a week before the election, and in person right up until election day.
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO REASONABLE WAY TO BELIEVE THAT A PERSON QUALIFIED TO VOTE IN FLORIDA, WAS DENIED THAT RIGHT BY THE CHANGE FROM 15 DAYS OF BALLOT ACCESS, TO 9 DAYS. If the only time you had time to vote was those six days, you were well within the window in which you could get an absentee ballot by mail.
So, real-time reaction to this: from 14 to 8 days seems to be a change large enough to warrant a questioning look. The actual voting statistics annihilate that questioning look, and make it want to go home crying that it didn’t mean anything, mister, honest. If nine days of early voting – which seems in line with the other states, none of which seem to be the targets of this they-stole-my-vote gibberish – was the cause of excessive lines, then those lines are in precincts being run by idjits. Half the voters came in the preceding week. If a 50% reduction in the “normal” turnout – and that 50% a near-record in the COUNTRY – isn’t enough for the ground troops to handle things on election day proper, well….you got a beef with the ground troops, and the legislature doesn’t deploy them.
Strange comment policy. Expressing that someone who repeatedly intentionally misreads details in an article and my comments for the purpose of bickering is a waste of time is unacceptable, but characterizing qualifying the acceptability of methods of voter suppression as “beating your wife” questions is acceptable.
As a domestic abuse and gas lighting survivor , I find this makes this space unwelcoming to say the least.
But, your space, your rules. Happy to bow out, which I already did, but I felt compelled to return when my email notification of follow up comments triggered me for a second time with the wife beating analogy.
Hmm. I was about to respond to that, opened my mouth, and…hmm. You are right, and I apologize for that analogy. It is, of course, an extremely common idiom particularly among the logic-chopping set, and I reached for it the way one reaches for a handsaw that has occupied the same place on the workbench for 40 years. And then one day someone points out the horribly sexist logo on that trusty, innocent old axe that makes them shiver and feel afraid, and you think “fuck, am I blind?”
Didn’t even think about it. Realize that’s not an excuse. Very sorry for using it, and will try to eliminate its usage in the future, pretty much across the board, because it pretty much could have the same impact anywhere, and that is not my desire. Again – apologies.
On your other substantive point that I am bickering etc., – nonsense. You made a specific fact claim. I don’t see it supported in the text. I asked for a cite. You responded that it was “clear”. Well, it isn’t clear, and every person who has come along (OK, one other person) has had a different answer every time they wrote down what was apparently blatantly obvious. If you bow out because of my asshanded analogy, then I apologize again and humbly ask you to come back; if you bow out because this level of evidence-demanding seems too picky to bear, well, it’s a free Internet.
Hillary, that’s a good point about the “have you stopped beating your wife” cliche. I’ll try to keep that in mind in the future.
Robert, regarding Hillary’s point, I think that focusing on the exact number of counties avoids her substantive argument, which was that the article I linked to probably lowballed the number of voters kept from voting by long lines, because it didn’t examine some important counties.
Whether the exact number of counties examined is two, three or four, it seems clear that some counties were left UNexamined. That to me seems like an important point, which is why I think Hillary is substantially correct in her argument and your argument against her misses the point. Am I missing something?
Yes, you’re missing something. Given that the study as quoted (though not apparently cited) presents a range of possibilities, knowing the exact scope of that range is important to know what, if anything, the study says.
If I say “my study of liberal websites, which isn’t exhaustive and which focuses on XXXX DATA NOT AVAILABLE XXXX indicates that at least 12, but possibly as many as 36, of those websites are actually fronts for the Brazilian mafia”, then you really gotta know what DATA NOT AVAILABLE says. Does it look at 36 websites, and find that 100% of them are at least somewhat tied to El Mortes De Rio? Does it look at 3600 of them and find that at most 1% are?
Counties aren’t fungible, and I haven’t been a Floridian in 37 years; the addition of one county might mean 2,000 additional voters or it might mean 2,000,000.
In addition to those prosaic concerns, I have a reputational concern. If you haven’t read the study, then you’re relying on a media representation of the study. Media representations of studies range from complete shit on the bad end to mostly shit on the good end. Everyone else is in the same boat. If I’m asking “what does the study actually say about seemingly marginal point X”, and NOBODY KNOWS, then nobody knows what the study actually says, and – while good conversational manners means I still listen to the people – I am free to assign less Awesome Academic Weight to their pronouncements about “this study proves” etc.
Robert, enjoying the show. And to all – while I support retiring the “beating your wife” phrase, I was wondering how to replace it. In reading about logical fallacies, this is the primary example given to illustrate what apparently is formally known as a “loaded question”. Since that phrase itself is often improperly used, perhaps it would be more useful to call it a “trick question” or a “presumptuous question” (making presumptions about the situation that are unproven). The proper response is to divide the question – so, “have you stopped beating your wife” (forgive me, it’s the example at hand) turns into “Did you ever beat your wife?” and then “Have you stopped?”
So from now on, we perhaps should just respond “That’s a trick question and I reject the presumptions behind it.”