If true, I don’t know whether to be sorry we won’t have Jeb! to kick around again — I think he’d lose unless the Democrats really screwed up — or happy that there’s no chance he’d actually get elected … Florida Dems are capable of giant screwups …

Update: It’s official: Jeb’s not running. Nobody ever said he wasn’t smart.

Should be quite a race to succeed him in both parties. I look forward to the blogger outreach….

Charlie Crist is a smart politician.

The loooong lines at the Florida polls were making people wonder what was wrong (again!) with the state’s voting officials. One reason for the long lines was that the legislature changed the rules to reduce the hours and locations — a combination of penny pinching and the historical GOP bias against making it easy for the riff-raff to vote. So it was popular politics for the would-be post-partisan Governor (but see his judicial appointments!!!) to do whatever it took to restore some sanity by extending polling hours to 12 hours per day from the artificially short six hours in most locations.

Lost in all the kudos for the Governor’s act of sanity (has it come to this? the government does the obvious and necessary and the Herald’s local columnist falls over herself praising it? ) is the political calculation undoubtedly behind this move. Never forget that Charlie Crist is one smart calculating politician: you don’t move from “Chain Gang Charlie” to Mr. (attempted) Middle-of-the-Road without a keen sense of how the wind blows.

Now, imagine you are a Republican who believes that his political chances will be best helped by carrying his state for the GOP, or failing that by being seen to have gone the extra mile for the ticket. It’s true that having McCain/Palin win the election is bad for your long-term future, but there’s so little chance of that happening that you can afford to make a big Florida push.

What are you afraid of? The biggest thing on your mind is that the GOP vote is going to stay home. You’re worried they’re going to stay home because they never liked John McCain anyway. You’re worried they’re going to stay home because they think Sarah Palin is unfit to command. You’re worried they’re going to stay home because the polls suggest that the state and the nation are lost. And, to top it off, you’re worried they’re going to stay home because with all this baggage weighing the ticket down, a measurable fraction of the GOP vote is going to stay home because it doesn’t want to stand in line for three hours. (Anecdotal evidence suggests, that the average Obama voter is more energized about the ticket than the average GOP voter, so the long lines just make matters worse.)

So of course Charlie Crist did what he had to do to shorten the poll lines. It was smart politics. And self-interested too.

The Fla. tally so far: Ds up 80K votes

Through Sunday, it appears absentee and early votes have Democrats up by 80,287 votes.

Of the 1,010,046 people who voted early, 53.7 percent were Democrats, 30.19 percent Republicans and 16.02 percent other. Of the 1,059,518 absentee ballots returned so far, 35.31 percent were from Democrats, 50.23 percent Republicans, and 14.46 percent other.

All told, 2,069,564 people have voted already — 44.33 percent of them Democrats, 40.45 percent Republicans, and 15.22 percent other.

These are statewide totals.

Early voting should not be confused with absentee voting.

Absentee voting is where you or someone pretending to be you asks to be sent a ballot, and then you or they fill it out with any number of close friends watching. Absentee balloting is a rolling feast, which I think began some time ago.

Early voting is just like regular voting, complete with new optical scanning voting machines, except the hours and locations are different. You can’t do it in as many places, nor for as many hours in the day.

Eye on Miami kindly provides a guide, Miami Dade Early Voting Where and When.

I’ve never voted early — there’s something about the democratic ritual of the polls, plus the convenience of the local site, only a few blocks from home, that makes it very appealing, even as I wonder whether it should be legal to use a Catholic Church as a place to hold state balloting on state constitutional amendments regarding things like abortion or gay marriage. Might it sway some religious Catholic voters on some issues? But I digress.

I’m somewhat tempted to try early voting this year, as I think the lines at the polls will be long. But I hear they will probably be long at the early voting stations too.

The content of this thing is pretty ugly. Here’s a shot of the worst page. You can click on it for a larger .pdf version of that page.

This is accompanied by a smiling photo of Governor Charlie Crist, along with a message warning that terrorists want to kill us, and that we should vote for Republicans to “help keep America safe.” (You can download a .pdf of the entire mailer, if you want.)

Got that? The State GOP, which paid for this thing, and the formerly post-partisan Governor, are saying that Democrats want to surrender to terrorists. Talk about low-class smear jobs…

Does anyone actually think that Democrats want to surrender to terrorism? Most Democrats want to make an orderly exit from Iraq. So, the polls tell us, does most of the country. (And, for what it’s worth, during the second Presidential debate it was Obama who took the more bellicose approach towards chasing down bin Laden, not McCain.)

It used to be that we only saw stuff like this in the last week before election day. But the GOP wants absentee ballots, and early voting starts soon, so here we go.

You must either mail (with today’s postmark) or hand deliver a completed application to any Supervisor of Elections’ office in the state, a driver’s license office, a voter registration agency, an armed forces recruitment office, or the Division of Elections.

And if you are a US citizen who is a Florida resident and is not already registered, you must do it today — or miss out on what will undoubtedly be the most important Presidential election since we re-elected the current disaster. And maybe even more than that.

It seems they also do outreach, and they’re coming to a meeting room near me — tomorrow. The following just plopped into my mailbox:

Florida Supreme Court Committee to Host Nine Public Meetings on Future of Florida Courts

Think of the changes Florida has undergone in the last two decades – and imagine the changes that will take place in the next two decades.

As Florida changes, so too must Florida courts. Sheer population growth will increase the number of cases coming into the courts. Significant changes in demographic and societal trends will alter the kinds of cases that the courts must resolve. Economic changes will impact the resources available to handle cases. Emerging technologies will change the ways people interact with each other and with the courts.

Florida’s judicial branch is working on a long-range strategic plan so that the courts can respond to new challenges and stand firm as a strong cornerstone of a well-functioning society and a healthy economy. And it wants to hear from people around the state as it develops its plan.

The Supreme Court Task Force on Judicial Branch Planning will hold nine meetings around the state, including in Miami. The Task Force is inviting citizens and local officials to share their thoughts on trends and conditions that they believe will impact the ability of the judicial branch to carry out its mission over the next 20 years. The current strategic plan for the Florida judicial branch, which can be found at www.flcourts.org/gen_public/stratplan/index.shtml, includes the mission and vision of the branch.

A public meeting will be held in the Miami-Dade area:

October 2nd, 2008 4 – 7 p.m.
Miami Dade Public Library
Coral Gables Branch
3443 Segovia Street
305-442-8706

Persons with disabilities or those using a TDD through the Florida Relay Service, 711, or who need an accommodation to participate should contact Kat Simpson at (850) 488-6569 as far in advance as possible, preferably at least five working days before the public hearing:

Individuals and organizations are also invited to submit written comments, which will be accepted through Nov. 1. Comments may be sent to:

Task Force on Judicial Branch Planning
Office of the State Courts Administrator
Strategic Planning
Florida Supreme Court
500 South Duval Street
Tallahassee, Florida 32399-1900

# # #

MISSION: The mission of the judicial branch is to protect rights and liberties, uphold and interpret the law, and provide for the peaceful resolution of disputes.

VISION: Justice in Florida will be accessible, fair, effective, responsive and accountable.

For more information contact: Steve Henley
Senior Court Operations Consultant
Office of the State Courts Administrator
850-488-6569 or henleys@flcourts.org

Could be interesting. Or, judging from some of the slides from a previous meeting, could be a bit odd.

(Other meetings around the state, mostly in the next few days, listed here.)

I’ve reproduced the full table below, sorted by percentage passing, based on the raw data (sorted by number passing) contained in a .pdf from the Bar Examiners.

But first, a few words of warning: Bar Pass Rates are Over-Rated As A Measure of Law School Quality.

It would be sort of interesting to extend this table with a column showing percent of class taking the exam, and also percent of class taking out of state exams.

The percent in-state vs. out-of-state tells you something about how national/regional/local the law school is. A large number taking no bar at all raises the question whether the law school is steering some students away from the summer bar exam in order to prop up its statistics, although there are also other very innocuous explanations. It may be that many students go on to LL.Ms and put off the bar, or that the school prepares them for other sorts of careers. The no-bar-anywhere number only raises a question, rather than answering it.

The first number is probably easy to get, but I don’t know about the second. We graduated 442 JD’s last year, making the 236 Florida test takers just 53.3% of the UM graduating class. My impression is that just about all of our JDs took a bar exam somewhere, and that the numbers reflect a reality that we run a school with both national and Florida ambitions, but I could be wrong about that. Indeed, if you’d asked me, I’d have guessed that the Florida-national ratio was more like 2:1 than 1:1, which suggests either that anecdotal evidence is not worth much, or that the school is becoming more national.

If you are a student and plan to vote absentee where you last lived, whether in or out of state, don’t wait to apply for that ballot; these things take time.

[Queued up to run while I’m in New York.]