NorthWest Florida Republican

Does it surprise you that we have issues with the turn-out of a race in florida? Once again, questions arise as to the number of votes cast for a candidate.

In the 13th district (note the irony here), there seemed to be a overly large percentages of “under votes”. This is caused by people not checking off of the box for a candidate or issue.

In this particular case it is the possible root cause of a democrat contender to lose the election.

I can understand how this might have happened. I decided to try out the new voting machines since I had the opportunity. The instructions were fairly clear and it went pretty smooth. Touching the box I wanted was pretty easy.

I went through the entire ballot and was about to finish when I just happened to notice a red box that was saying that that one issue was under voted. I can honestly say I had absolutely no clue what that meant. But all it took was for me to touch that box to be taken to the page with the issues. I still had to find it since it was only two candidates.

The space allotted for the issue was fairly small and easy to miss. Which is why I missed it the first time around. I would imagine that the same thing would have applied to the case in south florida.

Even though the touch screens are easy to use, I would imagine that many people would still feel intimidated by them. It is very probably that they just missed the fact that they didn’t vote for that race. Especially if no one took the time to explain it to them and they did not ask how to use it or correct things that look out of place.

The only thing I really did not care for was there really wasn’t a “warm fuzzy” feeling of having cast your vote. I would be nice to have had a printed receipt that I could have dropped in a box. This would make recounting the votes a bit easier and provide the voter with a sense of accomplishment that they actually voted and that the issues they voted on were correct. Right now, once you hit submit on the touch screen you are done. You really don’t know if your vote was recorded or not. Maybe election officials do but the voter doesn’t have that satisfaction of casting their ballot.

This is probably just one of those things where people would have to get used to the idea of using a touch screen machine to vote. But it would be nice to make the transition on the average voter a bit less stressful by providing a paper receipt for a few years to get everyone used to the idea.