Florida took center stage in the 2012 elections, when voters around the state had to wait in line at the polls for up to nine hours. Gov. Rick Scott (R) initially denied that there was any problem, saying it was “very good” that people were getting out to vote. But a new study shows that tens of thousands of people were actually discouraged from voting because of the long lines. According to an analysis by Theodore Allen, an associate professor of industrial engineering at Ohio State University, as many as 49,000 individuals in Central Florida did not vote because of the problems at the polls. About 19,000 of those people would have backed former GOP nominee Mitt Romney, while the rest would have gone for President Barack Obama, according to Allen.
If you’re a Republican looking to learn how to lie, cheat, and steal your way to victory in an election, you wouldn’t have to look any farther than Floriduh, where thousands of voters were successfully disenfranchised during this campaign season. The same could be said for Ohio; in both cases a Republican Governor and a Republican-controlled legislature conspired to keep the poor and minorities, two Democratic constituencies away from the polls. While their efforts may have borne fruit in state and local elections, Barack Obama managed to carry both states despite the cheating.
Both Ohio and Floriduh openly engaged in efforts to tilt the electorate sufficiently to hand both states to Mitt Romney. They knew they were cheating, you knew they were cheating, they knew that you knew they were cheating…and they still engaged in some of the most anti-democratic legislative efforts this century has seen. Floriduh, though, took their cheating to a level not even Ohio could reach. With Rick Scott, perhaps the most corrupt and venal chief executive any state has ever elected, in the Governor’s mansion, Floriduh Republicans worked long and hard to not only keep the poor and minorities from voting, they also did everything they could to keep them from being able to register to vote.
Instead of trying to figure out how to appeal to voters and convince them of the correctness and superiority of their ideas, Floriduh’s Republicans took the cheap and easy route. That they succeeded in keeping thousands of Floridians from voting is as shameful as it is criminal. If you believe in karma as I do, you’d have to believe that those who worked so hard to cheat and steal this election from Floriduh- and America- will get theirs. If you look at what’s happening to the Republican Party these days, you might think that process has already begun…and deservedly so.
Then again, voters in Floriduh elected the thugs, so perhaps they really did get exactly the quality of “leadership” they deserve.
Here’s a pro tip: IF YOU HAVE TO LIE AND CHEAT IN AN EFFORT TO STEAL AN ELECTION, YOUR IDEAS SUCK. American democracy is supposed to be based on the competition of a marketplace of ideas, NOT on dishonesty, theft, and racism. Of course, this is Floriduh we’re talking about….
