Florida state officials are looking for answers as to why ballot-counting across the Sunshine State encountered delays that put the national spotlight on Florida's election process for the second time in 12 years.
Earlier this week, Gov. Rick Scott, who has come under fire for some of the state's election procedures that caused voters to wait for hours and some provisional ballots to be counted well past Election Day, ordered a review of the state's elections process.
Ken Detzner, Florida's Secretary of State, reportedly met Wednesday with appointed and elected elections supervisors for some of the state's 67 counties to discuss possible methods to alleviate the hours-long wait and seemingly endless lines that voters in some of Florida's most populated counties had to wait on to cast their ballots.
Last year, Scott has been criticized heavily in recent days for supporting a law passed last year by Florida's Republican-controlled Legislature cutting back the number of early voting days and placing restrictions that making it more difficult to register voters.
"We need to make improvements in our election process," Gov. Scott said in a statement released Wednesday. "If even one Floridian has lost confidence in our voting process, we need to do whatever we can to make sure that confidence is restored. Florida has 67 independent, elected or appointed election supervisors who run elections in their counties and most of them did not have excessive lines or other problems tabulating votes."
Meanwhile, in Broward County, one of the counties with the longest wait lines in the state, elected officials are already beginning to look into the issues that affected voters trying to cast their ballots.
State Sen. Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood, the newly elected chairperson of the Broward County Delegation, announced this week that she was creating the 2012 Broward County Election Task Force to look into the problems that the county's constituents faced getting their votes cast.
"I am forming this task force not to point fingers at anyone, but to find solutions, real solutions that Broward and Florida desperately need," Sen. Sobel told the South Florida Business Journal. "We can no longer sit back and continue to be not only the butt of jokes around the country and the world, but a blemish on Democracy as well."
The task force will feature elected officials, members of the canvassing board, and elections and legal experts. There will also be a period during the meeting allotted for public testimony.
Sobel told the Business Journal that she is looking for testimony from anyone who wants to be part of the task force and has expert and/or firsthand knowledge of the elections process, with the ability to suggest answers to voting issues facing Broward and Florida.
Those who can do either can contact the task force via e-mail at: BrowardElectionsTaskForce@gmail.com
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