Tagged: Election 2012

Everyone #FLDispatches talked to about oystering told us the same thing: oysters are unusually scarce this season. 32-year-old Matt Hodges has been oystering for about three years and says the problem comes from a combination of overharvesting, a long stretch of drought and then torrential fresh water from Debbie and Isaac this year. Matt and his wife Holly are one of a handful of married oystering couples who work out of the Ochlockonee Bay that splits Wakulla and Franklin Counties.

A misprint on 60,000 absentee ballots means vote-counting in Palm Beach County will be sort of special again this year.

Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher said each of those ballots will have to be examined, the intent of each voter discerned, and the vote transferred to a properly printed ballot so it can be read by a tabulation scanner.

Voting in Florida has always been a contentious issue.  But now, it's even more so thanks to new voting laws passed by the Florida Legislature.

House Bill 1355 - passed in April 2011 - mandates a total of 80 changes to Florida's election laws. 

Among the most noticeable are  restrictions on voter registration, form filing deadlines and reductions in early voting days.  

How they may impacting the 2012 election is the subject of a new documentary airing on CNN this Sunday, called "Voters in America: Who Counts."

Voter registration ended on Tuesday, and elections supervisors are busy preparing for next month’s vote.

They say thousands of registrations have come in just this month, and the final numbers will come in next week once the state is done certifying all of the voter registration forms that came in at the deadline.

Monroe County Supervisor of Elections Harry Sawyer says he’s expecting a big increase.

“Even before we get the final numbers in, we’re still ahead of 2008," said Sawyer.

Florida's Attorney General, Pam Bondi, says she's not backing the state GOP's effort to oust three state Supreme Court Justices.

The Florida GOP is currently endorsing a conservative effort to remove Justices Fred Lewis, Barbara Pariente and Peggy Quince from the Florida Supreme Court. All three are considered by conservatives to be the most liberal members of the Court-- and they are up for a merit retention vote this year. This means Floridians will vote on whether these judges get to keep their job at the state's highest court.

Anyone in Florida who has already gotten their absentee ballot for this year's presidential election will notice that there are a lot - A LOT - of ballot measures.

According to The Washington Post, voters all over the country will be voting on almost 200 ballot measures.

There were just over 21-hundred jobs in the agriculture and mining sector in Lee County, by the last census numbers.

Our Dispatches from the Swing State project dropped in on one of the less conventional agriculture positions at the Umbuzi experimental farm in Buckingham, Florida.

Herald photographer Patrick Farrell and I are driving around the state to cut straight to the Florida voters and issues of the 2012 presidential election.

At the Umbuzi farm, we met award-winning goat cheese maker Jim Ellis.

David Shealy makes a lot of his money off Florida’s version of Bigfoot. He sells T-shirts, bumper stickers and hot sauce out of the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters off the Tamiami Trail in Ochopee, Florida.

Time is running out to register to vote in the November election, and a new television network is coming to Miami.

Check out these stories and more in the WLRN Miami Herald News at 7.

The state is investigating a Virginia-based company for possible voter registration fraud in Florida.

Strategic Allied Consulting was hired by the Republican Party of Florida to register voters ahead of the November election.

The Florida Division of Elections is concerned about a series of suspicious registration forms submitted by Strategic Allied.