Broward County Once Again Sucks At Life, Finds 963 Ballots In Some Warehouse

We almost went a day without a "stupid Florida" story. Almost.

In case you have already forgotten and moved on, there was an election eight days ago, and going into it everybody was quite fixated on a small number of states, Florida being one of them. As it turned out, Florida didn't matter because Obama got 7 billion out of the required 270 electoral votes.

And asthatturned out, it was very lucky, because Florida didn't finish counting its votes until the weekend after, by which time Romney had already canceled his campaign staff's credit cards and gone home to wallow in his swimming pool full of gold coins.

And asthatturned out, it was quite lucky as well, because Broward County just found almost a thousand uncounted ballots sitting in a damn warehouse. Serendipity!

People are deeply embarrassed over this, right WSVN ?

The supervisor of elections, Dr. Brenda Snipes, said this happens all the time, especially when dealing with paper ballots... Snipes noted that it is a routine thing to look for these kind of mishaps after election night and she is just glad that they are now being tallied into that final count.

Ah. Ok. So it's totally normal to be finding people's ballots more than a week after the election is over, and"this happens all the time."Say... this Snipes lady sounds familiar. Could she also be the one who presided over crazy vote-tally discrepancies last week, where minority polling places saw votes disappear? Yes!The Snipeses are the same person! A+, BroCo. Solid effort.

Still, though, they just found a loooad of ballots. Is this not reason for alarm?!

Snipes said there is no reason for alarm.

Oh.

"I've run several elections here, and this election was run no different than any other," she said.

Well, at least they are learning from their mistakes. What's that? She's still blabbering? Well then, by all means...

"I think the difference with this election is that there was a close race between the two presidential candidates, and there was pressure put on everyone, including our office, to get all of the votes, count, count, count, so you don't have an opportunity to check every box that comes back because you got to get what you got in hand and get it out of there, so if the voters would rather that we kind of sit back and relax and then clean up and find ballots. Then I think they would really be very upset."

It's not clear that even she understands what she is saying there, but it appears to loosely translate to "We were so busy counting votes that we neglected to count votes," which is... understandable? At least now they can chill out for a minute and count the votes, which always goes well in Florida. Yup. Never been a problem counting votes down there — that "hanging chad" thing wasallll a dreeeeam.

Also a dream: The District 18 race, in which Congressman Allen West appears to have lost to Reasonable Human Patrick Murphy. We are still stuck saying "appears to have," because St. Lucie County hath shat the bed counting its paper ballots. They're "re-feeding" early votes cast before election day, because there is no legal provision for a recount, but they still buggered it up pretty bad. We'll let BradBlog tell you how it's going :

On Sunday, election officials in St. Lucie County, Florida re-tallied votes from the last three days of Early Voting, citing what county officials described cryptically as "an issue with the memory cards that record the ballots when they're fed through the machines originally." ...

Following Sunday's re-tally, both candidates reportedly lost votes. West lost 132 votes while Murphy lost an extraordinary 667, for an overall pickup by West of some 535 votes.

Yes. They recounted a bunch of ballots, andboth candidates had net losses. They are just making it up now, which is why we have not yet published our Wonket eulogy for The Colonel, even though we have been dreaming of it since February.

Anyway, it is fabulous news that Broward County has found these ballots, as it can now settle the recounts in its local elections, which are totally legit, still. And once that's done, everybody can forget about this mess and get back to being mean to Muslims .

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