Word: mcbrides
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...poll workers couldn't even boot up many of the new touch-screen voting machines, part of a $30 million upgrade undertaken after Florida's 2000 presidential recount debacle. Because of the voting fiasco, it took all of last week for state officials to confirm that Tampa attorney Bill McBride had narrowly, and stunningly, upset former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno in the Democratic contest to face Governor Jeb Bush. The two counties have until this week to revise their results, but a different outcome is unlikely...
Bush, not without reason, blasted the "incompetence" of South Florida's Democratic elections supervisors; they in turn groused about insufficient funding and guidance from him. But a McBride victory might be a bigger headache for the President's brother than the voting snafus. "If McBride could catch Reno," frets one prominent Florida G.O.P. donor, "he can catch Bush." In a state where almost a quarter of the eligible voters are fence-sitting independents, centrist McBride spooks the Bush campaign far more than liberal Reno. If the 57-year-old decorated Vietnam veteran and fiscal conservative could indeed upset Bush...
...raise test scores. Still, Florida ranks 40th in K-12 per-pupil spending. It's a key reason why tax-allergic Floridians have put expensive initiatives for universal pre-K and class-size limits on the Nov. 5 ballot--and why both items are favored in polls. As McBride sees it, the problem for Bush and his conservative legislature is that their emphasis on testing and vouchers--and controversial tax breaks for businesses that fund scholarships to send students to private schools--seems out of step with the peninsula's apparent new desire to invest in public education. "They...
Before he gets a chance to make that case, however, McBride has a primary mess on his hands. Reno has refused to concede McBride's win, since the worst voting problems occurred in her stronghold counties; she even asked for a manual recount, but state officials quickly refused. Still, how did she squander a more than 20-point poll lead over McBride, who has never held elected office? Despite Reno's celebrity and hold over liberal South Florida, Democratic donors wrote her off, convinced she would never capture enough of the conservative north. Her feckless campaign, whose only highlight...
...controversy after technical problems marred a primary election. Former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno refused to rule out a legal challenge to the results. Unofficial tallies showed that Reno, who wants to be the Democratic candidate to fight Florida's Republican Governor Jeb Bush in November, trailed newcomer Bill McBride by less than 1% of the vote. Following the 2000 fiasco, Florida spent $32 million on a new computerized voting system. But the machines rejected many voters' identification cards. Said election supervisor Gisela Salas: "Many election workers did not know how to operate the machines." COLOMBIA Words of Warning...