Miami-Dade didn’t finish counting ballots until well after the election was over. (Photo by Lance Fisher.)
By Ashley Lopez
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
The presidential election may have been called hours after polls closed in Florida, but the Sunshine State’s results weren’t called until days later, thanks to a series of problems in South Florida.
The Miami Herald reported Thursday:
Florida remains the only state in the union not to declare its presidential winner, and several tight local elections hang in the balance.
The fallout has left Florida the final much-mocked but blank spot on the long-decided Electoral College map.
Elections officials and Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez acknowledged a range of problems at a “handful” of sites — topped by a lengthy ballot and poorly organized precincts. But they also argued that no more than a half-dozen of the county’s 541 polling places experienced severe waits, including the Brickell Avenue area of downtown Miami, West Kendall, Country Walk, Goulds and Homestead.
As NPR pointed out, there were other problems as well. For one, Florida voters faced their longest ballot ever — as many as 12 pages in some counties. Secondly, early voting days were cut short as a result of Republican-led voting law changes.
Because there were fewer days to vote early, campaigns urged supporters to vote absentee, which skyrocketed the number of absentee ballots that needed to be counted by local election officials.
In response to such changes, Democrats encouraged supporters to take advantage of in-person absentee voting. Voters could show up at election offices as late as Monday to ask for an absentee ballot, which they would fill out on the spot.
“The Obama team shifted to get people to do in-person absentee ballots, which take a lot longer to process than early voting,” says Daniel Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida. “You have to open and verify and process the ballot, rather than immediately scanning it.”
Absentee ballots have to be certified individually before going into the machines to be tallied, notes NPR’s Greg Allen. Miami-Dade County, for instance, had to cope with a late influx of 54,000 absentee ballots, which were still being counted on Thursday.
The combination of longer ballots and a higher number of absentee votes helped to create the mess in Miami-Dade County.
The state’s long ballot contributed to the winding lines voters faced, and in some precincts, voters waited up to seven hours on Election Day. Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez said only a few precincts had long waits, which he said was caused by poor planning and precinct organization.
Two days after President Barack Obama gave his victory speech, Miami-Dade County finally finished counting the absentee ballots. However, other counties in South Florida still are not finished counting their votes.
The presidential election was called despite Florida’s uncertainty, because Ohio carried enough electoral votes to guarantee victory for President Obama.
In his speech, Obama mentioned that people had waited in extraordinarily long lines to vote this election.
“We have to fix that,” Obama said.