Category Archives: Miami

Today's Miami Herald has a cute Valentine's Day story about a Broward County couple finding love in traffic court.

When I went to traffic court a couple of weeks ago, all I got was my ticket dismissed. And as the cop didn't show up, I didn't even get to explain why the ticket — supposedly for stopping several inches beyond the line at a stop sign but in fact for behaving legally in a manner not enjoyed by a police officer — was an outrage. So much for my first pro se appearance in court…

Note to self: if you wear a tie to traffic court in Miami, they all think you are a lawyer representing someone else.

UM President Donna Shalala appeared on the Colbert show the other day. She endorsed Sen. Clinton for President, agreed with Colbert that Iran is supporting terrorists and (with a little prompting) that they are “absolutely” the enemy and said she was against universal health care.

The high point of this fairly dismal segment may have been when Pres. Shalala said she brought her own pillow to cabinet meetings in the Clinton administration. Unfortunately, this was not because the meetings were so dull, nor it seems for pillow fights, but just to sit on. Or perhaps it was when she got that frightened look in her eye — surely a rare event — as Colbert asked this former President of the University of Wisconsin to imitate the sound a cheese curd makes when you bite it.

Looks like I wasn't the only person to notice the weirdly high rate of undervotes in the special election. But could you imagine a more belittling treatment than this story in the Herald today?

Pesky 'undervotes' raise small concerns

More than 1,000 Miami-Dade residents failed to cast a vote, or had a vote that did not count, in Tuesday's strong-mayor referendum — a tiny percentage of the overall tally but still worrisome to some voter advocates watching the single-question ballot.

Though the difference wasn't anywhere near enough to swing the election — unlike November's disputed Sarasota election to replace Rep. Katherine Harris — the “undervotes” are still a concern, with election-reform advocates leery of touch-screen machines that do not leave paper trails.

“People don't go there and forget what they went for and walk out. I don't buy that,” said Sandy Wayland, president of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition.

Still, what makes these undervotes different and less sensational than others is that Miami-Dade absentee voters on optical-scan paper ballots cast nearly as high a percentage of undervotes.

The point about paper ballots is a good one, as it is genuinely hard to explain, but even so, there's good reason to worry that something funny is going on with our voting machines, as can be seen from this passage in one the Herald's own blogs:

an independent study that cites new evidence of machine failure in Sarasota County and concludes that misleading ballot design, voter turnoff and other theories do not account for the “extraordinarily high undervote rate” in the county.

The authors of the report, who said they performed a statistical analysis of electronic ballot and “event log data” from the November election, said they were “unable to propose a convincing mechanism based on voter, machine or ballot characteristics that completely explains the phenomenon.

“In a nutshell,” wrote authors David Dill and Walter Mebane, “the excessive CD-13 undervote rate in Sarasota County is not yet well-understood and will not be understood without further investigation.”

Once again, if you get all your news in print, you're missing out.

Here's a table, filched from the county elections office:

CHARTER AMENDMENT

744 of 744 Precincts Completely Reporting
		Percent	Votes
YES		56.48%	84,351
NO		43.52%	64,984
Total			149,335

Wait a minute….

Ballots Cast: 150,399. Votes total 149,335.

More than a thousand people turned up to vote for this (or submitted absentee ballots) and voted blank? What's up with that? Isn't that a remarkably high rate of spoiled e-ballots for an election with exactly ONE question on it?

Early voting and absentees broke about 2:1 in favor of the “strong mayor” but the actual number of votes cast was minuscule. Out of 1,050,581 eligible voters, only 42,171 voted in favor, and 23,197 against, for a spread of under twenty thousand. Today's voters should be a little more numerous, but with 281 of 744 precincts counted, we're only up to a total of 95,987 votes cast, and the election-day vote is split almost 50/50, with a slight edge to the “no” side.

If this trend were to speed up just a bit, it might become another nail-biter; at present rates, though, the “no” vote isn't catching up quite fast enough. Since the votes are not evenly distributed geographically, and I have no real sense of who has reported and who hasn't, I don't think the trend means much, so anything could still happen ….

Update: With 5/7 of the precincts reporting, the yes vote is now slightly ahead even with today's voters. The spread remains small — about 22,000 votes — but that's out of only 126,000 or so cast. Voter turnout is well into double-digit percentages, though, so that's something.