Florida Voters Wait Hours to Vote

[newbie23]

Elections officials, overwhelmed with voters, locked the doors to their Doral headquarters and temporarily shut down the operation, angering nearly 200 voters standing in line outside — only to resume the proceedings an hour later. On the surface, officials blamed technical equipment and a lack of staff for the shutdown. But behind the scenes, there was another issue: Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez. The Republican had never signed off on the additional in-person absentee voting hours in the first place. "That was counter to what I said on Friday, which was we were not going to change the game mid-stream," he said. "I said, ‘No, there's no way we did this.'" But Gimenez, who is in a nonpartisan post, quickly realized it was better to let the voting go on, and the voting resumed.

Doral Florida Early Voting Confusion - Florida Early-Voting Madness: Why Is This Still So Hard? - Esquire

WASHINGTON -- Once again, Florida and its problems at the polls are at the center of an election.

Early voting is supposed to make it easier for people to carry out their constitutional right. Tuesdays are notoriously inconvenient to take off work, so many states have given voters the option of turning out on weekends or other weekdays in the run-up to Election Day.

But in Florida this year, it has been a nightmare for voters, who have faced record wait times, long lines in the sun and a Republican governor, Rick Scott, who has refused to budge and extend early voting hours.

"People are getting out to vote. That's what's very good," said Scott.

People are getting out to vote -- but many of them are having to wait in line for three or four hours to do so. One contributor to DailyKos claimed it took 9 hours to vote. In Miami-Dade on Saturday, people who had gotten in line by 7:00 p.m. were allowed to vote; the last person wasn't checked in until 1 a.m., meaning it took some individuals six hours to cast a ballot.

"They didn't have the infrastructure," filmmaker Lucas Leyva, who was among those turned away, told The Huffington Post's Janie Campbell. "We read the press release and everything that went out this morning, promising we'd be able to get absentee ballots and vote. We got here and there was a line of hundreds of people all being told the same thing, that that wasn't true anymore. You could drop off [a ballot], but they could not issue one."

And if getting turned away from the polls weren't enough of an indignity, some of those 180 people ended up getting their cars towed from the parking lot across the street, according to a Miami Herald reporter.

Florida Early Voting Fiasco: Voters Wait For Hours At Polls As Rick Scott Refuses To Budge