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Has voter apathy given Florida Gov. Rick Scott an election edge?

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Early voting lasted 14 days this year.  (Thomas Cordy / The Palm Beach Post)

Early voting lasted 14 days this year. (Thomas Cordy / The Palm Beach Post)

We hear a lot these days about the importance of liberty, the superiority of our democracy. We hear about selfless soldiers fighting abroad to defend our freedoms. We hear complaints about how special interests control our politicians.

So why don’t more people vote?

Election Supervisor Susan Bucher took extra measures and extra expense this primary to make voting as convenient as possible, holdng 14 early voting sites open for 14 days. And still, barely 1 in 10 registered voters bothered. That’s a shame.

As the Post’s John Kennedy reported, heavily Democratic Broward and Palm Beach County can take credit for having the worst voter-turnout results in the state, 11 and 12 percent, respectively.
Pundits are already spinning this into a narrative of good news for Gov. Rick Scott. Democrats, they say, are feeling uninspired by their choice of gubernatorial candidates, and so they may not bother to vote in November, either.

The last time a Democrat won the Florida governor’s race was 1994, a year when 62 percent of registered Broward County Democrats turned out to vote. Incumbent Gov. Lawton Chiles narrowly defeated Republican Jeb Bush that year. No Democrat has won the governor’s race since.

Need more convincing? Take a look at the results of Palm Beach County’s District 4 school board race, which had to go to a recount.

There were four strong candidates, none of whom won a clear majority, meaning a runoff is necessary. But between which candidates? School district employee Erica Whitfield won a clear-cut path to the runoff race by taking 4,963 votes. But the fates of two other candidates, are uncertain, as IT manager Tom Sutterfield and high school teacher Justin Katz, were separated by just 57 votes, out of 16,731 cast.

For Sutterfield, strong turnout for him in the Village of Atlantis made the difference. Nearly 1 in 5 cast a ballot, and half the votes were for Sutterfield.

By comparison, Katz, an advanced placement civics teacher, saw some of his strongest support come from a precinct where fewer than 1 in 6 voters cast a ballot, in Hunter’s Run, along Congress Avenue in south Boynton Beach. Although nearly half went for Katz, not enough turned out to make the difference.

A choice not to vote is a choice to hand the most basic of democratic responsibilities over to the organized few special interests. Why would anyone vote for that?


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