Word: florida
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...1980s and '90s, as traders developed increasingly sophisticated investment vehicles, the cons cropped up with increasing regularity. In 1985, a San Diego currency trader named David Dominelli was revealed to have fleeced more than 1,000 investors to the tune of $80 million. During the 1990s, a Florida church called Greater Ministries International bilked nearly 20,000 people out of $500 million in a pyramid scheme hatched by leader Gerald Payne, who claimed God would double the money of pious investors. (Dominelli pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, while Payne was convicted and sentenced...
What if the 2000 presidential election had hinged not on a diverse, messy, weird and slightly creepy hick state like Florida but on the most organized, practical and cordial one in the Union: Minnesota? What if, instead of going to court after court over hanging chads and butterfly ballots and whether a recount should happen, election officials had just calmly looked at each ballot and tried to figure out what the voter wanted...
...been Minnesota instead of Florida in 2000, this is what we would have found out: Voters are idiots. You make a clear, statewide ballot with neat little ovals to fill in? Some voters will put in check marks and X's. They'll fill out two ovals. They'll mark one candidate's oval in ink, try to erase that mark and then put their initials next to their correction, even though there's a law on the books forbidding voters to sign their ballots, to prevent voter bribing. They'll scrawl something about taxes in that oval, or about...
...count and declare a winner before Christmas, well before the U.S. Senate is seated on Jan. 6. The five-member board was chosen by Democratic secretary of state Ritchie, but both sides are satisfied with his appointments. To prepare himself, Ritchie not only watched HBO's movie about the Florida recount, but he watched it in a particularly Minnesotan way. "I was especially interested in the bonus features of the disc," he says. Meantime, reviewing the wacky ballots - available to the public as PDF files - is by far the most popular activity on the Minneapolis - St. Paul Star Tribune website...
...Florida was concerning to us,” Plouffe said, adding that if Florida’s primary had been held before Super Tuesday, “it might have mitigated all of South Carolina, and, in fact, we might not be the nominee...