No One Could Have Known
by tristero
Saying early voting cost too much money with rules that weren’t uniform, Republican legislators led a charge three years ago to set new statewide standards limiting the number of polling sites and their hours of operation.
Those revamped rules trimmed early voting from 12 hours per workday to eight.
During the first presidential election since Gov. Jeb Bush signed the bill in 2005, the new law’s impact can be seen throughout South Florida: exhausting lines at polling sites in Miami-Dade and Broward that led voters to miss work, senior citizens to beg for chairs and voting advocates to question whether some are being disenfranchised.
From Miami City Hall to the Southwest Regional Library in Pembroke Pines, voters on Monday and Tuesday — the first two days of early voting — sweated out waits of two to five hours. Broward reported record turnout for early voting, which ends Nov. 2.
Now, the debate over those achingly long lines has turned political. Some Democratic leaders contend the bill intentionally slowed down a process that has historically benefited the party.
There are two ways to look at this:
1. The Republicans were sincere about saving money by trying to make voting rules more uniform. By failing to take into account how this would mess up the people’s right to vote, they have proven they are – once again – totally incompetent at everything they touch.
2. The Republicans truly wanted to suppress Democratic votes by making the process of voting so onerous many people, especially Dems, would give up.
Personally, I see no reason why both can’t be true. They’re being both incompetent and malicious.