When a Californian votes in the Florida midterm elections
We’re no longer in hanging chad territory, but there’s still a lot to be improved on.
As a Californian who has been living in Miami for a little more than two years now, I am familiar to hearing jokes where Florida is the punchline. Sitting on your bed and a giant sinkhole swallows you into the earth? Only in Florida. Man high on bath salts strips naked, runs up to a homeless man sitting by the exit of a causeway and bites his face off? Yep! Florida!
But the original fucked up Florida story — the one that sets the bar for future fucked up Florida stories to come — was the hanging chad controversy during the presidential election fourteen years ago. You know, the faulty voting system which may or may not have resulted in Al Gore losing the election and George W. Bush becoming president.
Either way, what did I know? I was twenty-four years old in 2000; happy in my liberal bubble but politically ambivalent anyway, so for all I knew hanging chads were just the name of a bunch of 90's bros failing a pull-up test. What I did know was that Florida somehow fucked things up, all the time.
Of course, I thought all this with no idea I would eat those words and move here two and a half years ago. To Miami, a city whose unofficial slogan is “a sunny place for shady people,” and Florida, state of, well, the hanging chads.
A couple of weeks ago, I got to vote in Florida’s midterm elections, which were mostly for governor and a couple of other state and county-wide amendments. The cynical side of me was tempted to not vote at all — which, yes, would be sacrilege as someone who started a local civic hacking brigade — but the choices for gubernatorial candidate were less than inspiring, and given I’m a bleeding heart San Francisco liberal, I was certain all the issues I’d vote for would fail anyway. (Look, I’m relatively new to the civic side of civic technology.) But the conversation with my boyfriend Kareem pretty much went like this:
“Hey,” Kareem said, “we should really do early voting for the governor right now. I’ll be too busy to vote on election day.”
“Isn’t Adrian coming in twenty minutes so we can all go to dim sum?”
“This will only take fifteen minutes and the election place is like six blocks away.”
“Huh. Alright, let’s hurry.” I’m ashamed to say voting was less about my civic duties as a United States citizen as much as it was something I could knock out relatively quickly.
While Kareem drove I skimmed through my Facebook feeds to see if friends posted any local voter guides and comment debates as we drove to our polling place, the Lemon City Branch of the Miami-Dade Public Library in Little Haiti. We got out of the car and we heard folks yelling from across the street to vote or not vote for particular politicians or amendments. Solicitors have to be a certain distance away by law, but they can’t stop the sound of your voice if you’re yelling across the street, right? Some had catchy slogans and rhymed.
The Lemon City Branch was small but brightly lit and brightly colored. A couple of folks were reading at tables, one kid played an anime-style RPG on a web browser. This was clearly their community and I almost felt like I was intruding on their space. The early voting polls were in the back part of the library, blocked off by a glass door.
Kareem was right — coming early was a good call, because there were only one or two people in line. Compare this to last year, when we lived on South Beach during the 2012 elections and we waited in line for 45 minutes. Other counties in South Florida had lines of a couple of hours. A presidential election, but still.
We waited in a line to prove we were residents in the area, were handed green manilla privacy folders and waited in a different line three feet away so we could get our ballots to immediately be placed in said privacy folders. I scanned the room — there were more folks helping out than people voting, at least at the moment anyway. Some of them were helping elderly Haitian voters in Haitian Creole, one in particular dryly disposed of a woman’s political fliers she got across the street into a metal trash can.
“But how am I going to know who to vote for?” I heard the woman say. The pollster shrugged.
It was my turn in line, where an older gentleman in a Cuban accent handed me the ballot print outs and circled matching numbers on a receipt. You were voting in Precinct 504. These are the forms for Precinct 504. Do you acknowledge I am giving you forms for Precinct 504? I do, I say. Go to an empty booth when one is available. Fair enough.
Honestly, the process wasn’t bad so far. I wondered what it would be like on voting day, where it’d be a lot more hectic and there would be more language issues and the lines weren’t as easily marked off. I found an empty booth and opened up my folder to find three, double-sided 11" x 17" pieces of paper, tiny bubbles aligned with the thick compact black text in three languages.
The ballot was intimidating, I won’t lie. Take the photo above and imagine it being about nine times longer at six to eight point text, with 150 word proposed constitutional amendments and county questions translated in three languages and no real distinguishing way to tell which language is which on first glance. Even in San Francisco, where ballots are printed in Spanish and Chinese, there are subtle changes in user-experience design — especially in the ballot’s use of white space and box outlines — where Miami could definitely take some cues, an extra page or two in paper costs be damned.
Afterwards, I placed my ballot in the folder and headed to the final station, something like a copying machine with an LCD screen. “Please place your ballots in the scanner, where the arrows are,” the girl next to me said.
“Please press the confirm button on the screen,” she said, her finger inches away from the confirm button on the screen. I did. I understand why they can’t just press the button themselves; to emphasize that the attendant isn’t held liable if a ballot was submitted by accident. Something voter fraud related and wanting to cover your ass as much as possible, perhaps? That seemed to be the modus operandi for anyone living in Florida: if you’re not trying to fraud the system, then you’re the victim of a system of defensive measures, placed to cut down on fraud, but at the cost of inconvenience or bureaucracy. You know, like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I pressed the button.
“Thanks,” she said. “You can pick up one of those stickers on the way out.” It said I Voted.
In hindsight, the process wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The total process from lining up to receiving a ballot to actually voting and submitting the ballot, took twenty five to thirty minutes. We didn’t spend a significant amount of time in line for early voting, and while Miami-Dade ballots are confusing, the voting user experience is a universal problem; it’s just especially a problem for a city with so many diverse people, like Miami. I expected — expect as in present tense? — a train wreck, and it’s not something I experienced this election. That’s good.
And best of all, no hanging chads.
