Word: crist
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...good news is that Florida's current governor, Republican Charlie Crist, is driven more by common sense than by ideology. After taking office last year, he scrapped the antiquated punch-card ballots (e.g., the butterfly ballot) as well as the flawed touch-screen voting machines favored by his conservative predecessor, Jeb Bush (the President's brother, who was governor from 1999 to 2007). A big reason: in a 2006 congressional race in Sarasota County, an incredible 15% of ballots cast on touch-screen machines registered no choice at all - in a race decided by a razor-thin margin...
...Another Crist dividend: Kurt Browning, his appointed secretary of state, who oversees elections, is actually an elections-management professional. Few can forget the secretary of state under Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, who oversaw the 2000 recount. Harris, Florida's last elected secretary of state, had no elections expertise and looked all but clueless when the chads hit the fan. Worse, her pledge of impartiality seemed laughable given that she was the George W. Bush campaign's Florida chairwoman. Browning, who like Crist has proved to be a more bipartisan operator than his predecessors, spent 26 years as a county elections...
...polls. The database against which IDs are checked failed miserably in 2000, when thousands of appropriately registered voters, especially African Americans, were turned away at polling sites. (Many were mistakenly pegged as convicted felons, who at that time were ineligible to vote in Florida even after serving their sentences; Crist has since made it easier to restore felons' voting rights.) Controversy arose again in 2004, when secretary of state Glenda Hood tried to purge 47,000 names from voter rolls - because the database, again mistakenly, told her that many people were ineligible - before county supervisors intervened...
...Barack Obama leading over John McCain 60% to 40% among early voters. What's more, the number of early voters could approach 30% of all of Florida's 11.2 million registered voters by the actual Nov. 4 Election Day. That massive turnout prompted Florida's GOP governor, Charlie Crist, to flash his bipartisan bona fides this week and lengthen early voting on weekdays by four hours (while letting each county decide whether to lengthen the normal hours this weekend...
...Still, McCain's peninsular campaign seemed to be gelling at his raucous rally on the Florida International University campus. Crist was on hand, telling the crowd that "this is giddyap time" and insisting McCain "is a guy who knows how to close a fight strong! Never count out John McCain!" More important, McCain himself set aside the ideological invective and zoomed in on Florida's bust. "Obama's associations with terrorists are important," says Longobarde, the antiques dealer, "but McCain needs to be talking about the economy and our housing collapse." She was gratified when McCain dived into his plan...