{"id":194687,"date":"2008-08-26T18:59:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-26T23:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/08\/26\/its-always-florida-isnt-it\/"},"modified":"2008-08-26T18:59:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-26T23:59:00","slug":"its-always-florida-isnt-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/08\/26\/its-always-florida-isnt-it\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s Always Florida Isn&#8217;t It?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, it&#8217;s a story from February, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.heraldtribune.com\/article\/20080202\/NEWS\/802020405\/1417\/RSS02\">once again, the state of Florida is f$#@ing with the right to vote<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>A little-known legal opinion issued days before Florida&#8217;s presidential primary has slammed the door on public oversight of the final vote tally in Florida elections.<\/p>\n<p>The closure comes because of questions posed by Sarasota County Election Supervisor Kathy Dent, whose controversial District 13 congressional race drew national scrutiny in 2006.<\/p>\n<p>Attorneys for the Florida Department of State say county election supervisors can eject outside observers from central computer rooms as they receive and add precinct results.<\/p>\n<p>Their ruling hinges on where votes are actually counted, a process that state law requires be open to observers. They contend that &#8220;tabulation&#8221; occurs at individual precincts and that computers in the central room are merely &#8220;accumulating&#8221; those results.<\/p>\n<p>What is more, the opinion states, observers and the public can be excluded from watching the local canvassing boards that must certify those vote counts &#8212; as long as there is alternative access, such as listening over a speaker system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Florida:  still a banana republic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, it&#8217;s a story from February, but once again, the state of Florida is f$#@ing with the right to vote. A little-known legal opinion issued days before Florida&#8217;s presidential primary has slammed the door on public oversight of the final vote tally in Florida elections. The closure comes because of questions posed by Sarasota County &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1000],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-elections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194687"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}