It’s time to change our election system
The state of Florida has become a punch line and a disgrace when it comes to elections. Yet, we are a bellwether for the nation at the same time whose outcomes resonate throughout the nation. Let me explain.
Florida is a punch line because two counties at the center of the current election crisis, Broward and Palm Beach have a history in which election ballots seem to just appear from thin air and with them taking victory out of the hands of one and putting it in another. There are too many instances of this to cite but they all have been well documented in media reports and elsewhere.
We need to focus on correcting this problem with the integrity of the Florida voting system, and to do this we have to look at the county level election supervisors, who are elected rather than appointed. Obviously, they are elected as members of a party, in the case of Broward and Palm Beach, the Democratic Party. Because they are party members there simply cannot be an expectation for the system to work fairly and objectively. There are no checks or balances in this system with the exception of the hope that supervisors are objective and doing their job in an unbiased fashion. In this case it is hard to make an argument for the deck not being stacked against one party or the other. There is a better way, one that will restore confidence and integrity in our election system.
In New York State, for example, two election commissioners are chosen by their respective parties, so the democrats choose a commissioner and a deputy for the Board of Elections of each county republicans do the same. This creates a system of checks and balances and assures that an action taken by one party official is checked by the other. When votes are cast at polling places there are both republican and democrat officials from the Board of Elections present and when the ballots are submitted it’s done through the same process with both democratic and republican representatives. When absentee ballots come in there’s also one representative from each party and the ballots are placed in a secure area. And when those absentee ballots boxes are opened each party has a representative there to oversee the counting of them.
It is time for Florida to eliminate elected Supervisors and implement a system like the one in New York. Supervisors concerned about their jobs may take solace that their party may “reappoint” them to the position. Besides this system provides the parties with more patronage, not less, which should make it more palatable to the politicians in general. After all, they will have four patronage slots for each of Florida’s 67 counties.
Doing nothing and leaving things as they are will only ensure that in future elections we will continue to have these problems and be looked at as a Banana Republic where transparency and accountability do not exist. We’re better than that. I’m calling on our state elected officials to take action now, and urge all Floridians to contact their elected officials and demand they change the way our elections are overseen and processed.