In Florida, not all voting precincts are the same size

“This is not a complex problem.”

ORLANDO — When it comes to voting in Florida, not every polling place is created equally.

Some Florida polling places have more than 8,000 registered voters assigned to them while others are only an eighth of that size.

The result can be a wide variation in how many voting booths and scanners are available to voters in their given precinct. That can create unequal opportunities for voters, based on where they live, if there are long lines like the ones Florida voters experienced on ElectionDay lastweek.

“I’ve been voting since 1978 and I have never inmy entire voting time felt like my votewas notwanted as I felt last week,” said Mary Luz, aCapeCoral real estate agent who waited more than four hours to vote on Election Day in Lee County on Florida’s Gulf Coast. “They made it incredibly difficult to castmy ballot.”

Last week, lines were especially long in Broward, Lee, Miami-Dade and Orange counties, and voters in Lee and Miami-Dade cast ballots even after Republican challenger Mitt Romney had conceded to PresidentBarackObama. County election officials blamed the Florida Legislature for shortening the number of early voting days and an unusually long ballot that included the full text of11state constitutional amendments.

Unlike some other states, Florida lacks a statewide standard for the ratio of voters to voting stations or voters to ballot scanners. New York restricts the ratio to no more than 800 registered voters per station. Pennsylvania sets a range of 300 to 400 registered voters per station, depending on the type of election. Ohio recommends a ratio of 175 registered voters per station.

In Orange County, home to Orlando, the ratio of nonhandicapped voters to station ranged from 665 to 112 at the start of Election Day, although elections office workers drove around with some 300 extra voting booths and distributed them throughout the day when requested by poll workers. Andsomeprecinct workers, seeing large crowds, set up tables for voters to cast their ballots if they didn’t mind a lack of privacy.

Miami-Dade calculates a ratio of 70 voters per voting station but that’s based on an assumption that only a third of registered voters show up on Election Day, even though two-thirds of the county’s registered voters cast their ballots this past election either by going to their precincts, early voting or by absentee ballots. When all registered voters are included in a precinct, the non-handicapped voting booth ratio ranges from 456 to 289, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Election officials in Broward and Lee counties were unable to provide ratios when requested by AP.

A study of Virginia election data from2004 byUniversity of Michigan political scientist Walter Mebane showed a decline in turnout when the ratio of actual voters per stationwas greater than around 350 or 400. But a follow-up analysis using 2008 election data showed the figure could be as lowas 225 voters per machine.

“At some point long lines, specifically long waiting times to vote, cause turnout to decrease because voters who can’t wait give up and leave,” Mebane said in an email.

After a series of election troubles last decade, the Florida Legislature required counties to use an optical scan system that requires voters to fill out their choices with a pen on a paper ballot, which is then fed by the voter into a scanner. The ratio of scanners to voters in each precinct also varies widely, and some voters like CathyKerns said they waited as long as an hour and a half to scan their ballot even after they had waited for hours to enter the polling place.

“I could see where people were leaving,” said Kerns, who waited three hours to get a ballot and then an hour and a half to feed it into the scanner at her Orange County precinct. “People were there to vote but they could not continue to stand … Are you going to lose your job so you can vote?”

A 2006 survey by New York City elections officials found the average ratio was 1,402 voters per scanner in the nation’s most populous counties that used optical scan systems.

In Orange County, the ratio of scanners to registered voters ranged from 5,150-to-1 to 1,116-to-1 on Election Day, depending on the precinct. In Lee County, the ratio was roughly one scanner for no more than 3,500 actual voters, Elections Supervisor Sharon Harrington said.

Miami-Dade calculates a scanner ratio of one for every 473 voters but again that’s predicated on only a third of voters showing up on Election Day. If all registered voters are considered, the ratio ranges from 1,673 to 866 in polling places that only have a single precinct.

Broward was unable to provide figures.

Florida Democratic Party chairman Rod Smith said state lawmakers can quickly and simply fix the state’s election woes by rolling back previous changes to early voting, expanding locations and also having supervisors pick up postage costs for absentee ballots to encourage more people to vote by mail.

“It’s quick. It’s simple,” Smith said Friday. “This is not a complex problem.”