"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast" -Oscar Wilde |
"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself." -- Proverbs 11:25 |
As of November 3, the statewide vote margin on Amendment 4 never exceeded 10,000 – ranging from a 6,500-vote edge against allowing slots in South Florida to a margin of 10,000 or so more citizens voting against slot machines.
The amendment looked headed to a razor-thin defeat. Not only that, the 0.1% total state margin would have required a recount of the vote tallies for the constitutional Amendment. (Anything less than 0.5%.) So the vote was 50-50 with 99% of the votes counted, a squeaker.
But a week later, the Amendment was ahead by 93,000 votes. How so?
Well, Broward County found 78,000 absentee votes that had not been counted (absentee votes in Broward are opti-scanned; only the in-precinct Election Day votes are touchscreen). The vendor for Broward is ES&S. Part of the problem was that the ES&S tabulator model used for absentees in Broward could not breach its limit of 32,000 votes without generating a massive numerical error, a newly discovered "counting-backward glitch" (that affected also some North Carolina counties and God knows where else, and that ES&S now has to fix and reprogram for future elections).
Amazingly, in this 50-50 election a miraculous 74,000 of 78,000 new Broward absentee voters voted "Yes" on slot machines. So most voters in the state were split right down the middle, but 95% of the newfound absentee voters were strongly in favor of betting.
Truly, a miracle for betting afficionados and the state Dept. of Education which wanted a dedicated share of the gambling revenues.
Now who was suspicious of these new counts? Well, Paul Seago, executive director of Orlando-based No Casinos, Inc. Also, state rep Randy Johnson (R-Celebration) who was chairman of No Casinos. They maintained doubts about the final approval margin, 119,000 votes, for the pro-slots measure.
[snip]
Johnson checked with statistical experts and he came away believing the disparate vote pattern could not have strayed so far from 50-50 merely by chance, that it would be a 1-in-a-million possibility.
The second aberration was Pinellas County, where a 17,000 vote reversal was recorded and sent off to Tallahassee for final inclusion and certification. The flipped vote-margin remains in the state certified count to this day, even though all parties acknowledge the error. [Translation – Glenda Hood leaned on "regulations" and "deadlines" to forbid the correction of the state number.] The error was not by machine so much as by a paper and pencil reversal by a worker. Staff of Elections supervisor Deborah Clark, a Jeb Bush appointee, learned of the flip on November 4, but 8 days later Clark still sent Tallahassee the wrong results (supposedly approved by 17,000 Pinellas voters instead of rejected by a 17,000 vote margin in Pinellas). "Pinellas elections office knew [Nov. 4] soon after Election Day of a discrepancy in vote totals on a statewide slot machine initiative, but they didn't fully investigate for two weeks." So the false vote totals were maintained knowingly for weeks, until state certification was past.