Ballot through slender slot, one early vote in count

By PAMELA HASTEROK
VANTAGE POINT Daytona Beach News-Journal

Last : October 22, 2004

 

It's amazing what a public outcry can do. It turned countywide early voting from "humanly impossible" to "done" in the space of a week.

Ah, the power of the citizenry to appeal to the better instincts of elected officials. Ah, the power of a lawsuit to move people to the side of right.

Miraculously, early voting opened at libraries in Daytona Beach, New Smyrna Beach and Deltona, as well as the election office in DeLand, right on time Monday. Somehow the voting machines that Supervisor of Elections Deanie Lowe said wouldn't be available were available. Somehow the workers she said couldn't be spared were spared. Somehow, facing a ticked off public and a voting discrimination lawsuit, Lowe and the Volusia County Council found the money and the means to offer early voting to the far-flung corners of this county.

That fiasco-turned-success story offers a civics lesson for us all. Democracy begins with the vote, but it is only executed when people participate. If community leaders and unhappy residents hadn't demanded early voting throughout the county, anyone who needed to vote before Election Day would have been forced to haul themselves to DeLand, the only site Lowe and the council had seen fit to provide.

As just one of the 8,615 folks who cast their ballots early so far, I thank them. More people voted early in the first four days of the general election than voted early in the entire two weeks before the primary when they could only vote in DeLand five times more.

That says something. It says that people want to vote early, if only they're given a chance. Maybe they have to work on Election Day. Maybe they'll be on vacation. Maybe they can't get a baby sitter. Maybe they're worried about long waits Nov. 2.

You don't have to go anywhere to vote early, of course. You can simply call for an absentee ballot and send it in. But there's a crucial difference between voting absentee and voting early. When you vote early, you fill out your ballot and deposit it into a vote-counting machine. When you vote absentee, someone else does the last step for you.

That's enough to make me nervous, considering the state's checkered past with absentee voting. In a Miami mayor's race, a dead person was found to have cast an absentee ballot, obvious election fraud. In the 2000 presidential race, some absentees weren't counted because they lacked a witness' signature.

So it should be no surprise that record numbers of Floridians are voting early. In Volusia, the opening-day crush created lengthy delays, but they have since dissipated. The biggest problem has been overeager pamphleteers bombarding voters with unwanted campaign literature. The day I went, the party volunteers were well off in the parking lot, kept away by a deputy guarding the library entrance. He looked pretty bored.

I scurried into the City Island Library just before the 5 p.m. closing time to cast my vote along with some 20 others. It went just like you would expect on Election Day. Six county workers provided voters with ballots. They also found an errant registration for a woman whose name was misspelled and assisted a senior who had no photo I.D., helping her fill out an affidavit so she could vote. One bewildered voter asked a worker "what do these say?" pointing to the long list of amendments to the state constitution. The worker returned with a guide.

I filled out my ballot, taking more care to color within the lines of the tiny ovals than a kindergartner with a paint-by-numbers project. I paused over the confusing constitutional amendments and wondered how we had so many judges I'd never heard of. I chose my president. I walked to the corner and fed the ballot into the voting machine, watching it disappear through the slender slot.

I had voted.

Then, for extra assurance, I sent up a prayer to the voting gods: Please count it.