Despite President Obama’s re-election being officially projected just after 11 p.m. on Tuesday, ballots were still being counted well after in Florida, where voters waited in lines well past midnight.
This is a national shame.
No one in this nation should have to wait in line for hours simply to vote — and yet Florida was the only state in which this was the case. At least during the recount fiasco in 2000, the outcome of the election was in our state’s hands. America watched on the edge of its seat as Florida screwed up.
This time, Florida screwed up and it didn’t even matter. Since Obama won the necessary 270 electoral votes without it, and Romney couldn’t have won the election even if he had gotten it, our state again stood out as an embarrassment as we continued to count votes a day after a victor was declared.
Of course, one of the key lessons to be taken from this mess is the need to invest time and resources into perfecting an efficient and secure means of voting electronically. We need to find a viable way of bringing voting into the 21st century.
However, Florida’s troubles weren’t accidental by any means. They were mostly self-inflicted by Gov. Rick Scott and the Republican-dominated legislature, whose repugnant attempts to suppress the vote backfired. Rather than steal the election for Romney, cutting early voting from 14 to eight days simply led to a massive influx of absentee ballots and the maddeningly long lines in South Florida.
It even led to the president subtly denouncing the long lines in his victory speech early Wednesday morning: “By the way, we have to fix that.”
There is no question that Florida needs to get its act together. If we’re ever to cease being the laughingstock of the country during election season, we need to elect officials who truly value democracy.
Gov. Scott and Florida Republicans evidently don’t hold this value, as their efforts to suppress the vote by pushing ID laws, burdening registration drives, cutting the days for early voting and purging legitimate voters from the rolls are anything but democratic.
Election-night debacle aside, Florida Democrats, liberals and progressives have much to be happy about.
Most notably, it appears President Obama has again won the state, since as of Wednesday he was up by almost 50,000 votes. Although this is slim margin of only about 0.7 percent, it’s a winning margin nonetheless.
In addition, Florida Democrats made net gains in the legislature. Republicans still vastly outnumber them, but their gains of two seats in the state Senate and possibly five in the House will topple the GOP’s supermajority, which will (hopefully) compel Republicans to cooperate in a much more bipartisan way in the years ahead.
On the federal level, liberals should be happy to know that Rep. Corrine Brown (D-3) and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-20) were re-elected by healthy margins, while former one-term congressman and progressive hero Alan Grayson was again elected to the House in the Orlando-Kissimmee area.
Possibly more reason to celebrate is odious Tea Party firebrand Rep. Allen West’s (R-22) defeat to Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy. One term was more than enough for this McCarthyite.
Lastly, but equally as important, most of the proposed amendments to the Florida Constitution were voted down.
The amendments — placed on the ballot by Republicans — not only contributed to the late-night troubles, as the high number of them made voting and vote-counting significantly harder, but they also proposed a host of detrimental measures that would have endangered women’s reproductive rights, the separation of church and state, the expansion of health care coverage, and the integrity of our court system, among others.
These victories should fill lefties with hope. It’s a sign that even in the Deep South, progressives can prevail. Now, if only our state could learn how to vote …
Moisés Reyes is a grad student in journalism at UF. His column appears on Fridays. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
