Early Voting Pinellas: Deborah Clark can suck it
October 31, 2008 at 2:39 pm by Joe Bardi
Fuck Deborah Clark. The Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections has proven herself incompetent this election cycle. Unless two hour wait times to vote are your idea of a job well done. In that case, you must be a Republican with voter suppression on his mind, because under no other objective evaluation could what is currently going on at at the three (THREE!) sites for early voting in Pinellas County be called a success.
That’s not to say it’s a horrible experience. I voted this morning at the First Avenue N. location in downtown St. Pete, arriving just after 9:30 a.m. Despite the long line, the mood of the voters seemed light and relaxed. The weather was gorgeous. People joked around and yakked on cell phones. I even spotted CL Street Teamer Shawn Alff engrossed in a book.
An Obama volunteer named Mike supplied the crowd with free bottled water and cheatsheats on voting a straight Dem ticket before making a speech pushing Jack Killingsworth, Deb Clark’s challenger for Supervisor of Elections. Mike had help from an older woman (I never caught her name) who handed out Obama ‘08 stickers and explained to the crowd that they would be allowed to wear them inside. (About half the folks who took a sticker pocketed it, for fear that the woman was wrong. She wasn’t.) There were also attorney’s on hand to assist any voters who had questions or problems voting. Again, no thanks to Deborah Clark.
The only real unpleasantness went down right before I got inside. Due to the location of the door to the voting office, the line snaked in front of a driveway that ran along the side of the building. There was a rent-a-cop guy out front; we’ll call him Tik-Tok. Tik-Tok’s main job was to keep people from blocking the driveway by splitting the line and leaving a gap of 15 feet or so. Small groups would then move across the drive when there was enough room for them to reach the sidewalk on the other side. I crossed in a group of 12, of which only about seven made it up the curb. Myself and several other people ended up near the curb but still in the street. Tik-Tok bumbled over and began SCREAMING, “Back up or move forward! Don’t block the drive! BACK UP! MOVE FORWARD! BACK UP!” His sudden, confusing vocal agression was incredibly heavy-handed. Simply explaining what we needed to do would have been fine. Instead, Tik-Tok went into a rage.
Though I was in the street, I never moved because it was clear that Tik-Tok’s ravings weren’t aimed at me. Instead, they were aimed at the African-American gentleman standing two feet to my left — and that guy was having none of it. Dude whipped out his phone, dialed and began yelling back at Tik-Tok, “You’re done! You’re going home! You’re OUTTA HERE!” Tik-Tok waddled away and was off the street by the time I was finished voting. I have no idea if they angry voter’s phone call had something to do with it, but I like to think it did.
Once inside, the actual voting was fairly simple. My ID matched my voter ID card and I had a printed ballot in my hands withing one minute of presenting them. I was forced to vote with a Bic ball-point pen (a marker would have been easier on the wrist), but that’s a minor quibble.
(Note: Editor David Warner reports that when he went to vote at the same location this morning, he brought an absentee ballot he had received in the mail but does not recall requesting. Had he not have brought the ballot, he would not have been allowed to vote — unless he was willing to fib and tell the poll worker that he never received it, in which case they would have let him vote. So, let that be a lesson: Bring the absentee ballot with you or lie and risk prison. You make the call.)
Let me take a moment at the end and to say “Thank You!” to the poll workers. Everyone (save Tik-Tok) was extremely professional and did his or her best to make the situation easy on everybody. All told, the actual voting took less than 10 minutes, and that is a credit to the poll workers. You guys are doing a far better job than Deborah Clark. I hope that come next year you have a new boss.
