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Take A Pencil And Fill In The Circle

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By DANIEL RUTH | The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 2, 2008

Please excuse an impertinent observation, but isn't the idea of the supervisor of ELECTIONS hiring a company to teach people how to VOTE, about as goofy as the tax collector retaining the services of a couple of panhandlers to gather up revenue?

Apparently not.

So there was Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson announcing the other day that he was going to piddle away $40,000 to hire a public relations flack to teach people to vote with the new fancy-schmancy optical scanning machines, which are scheduled to be used for November's elections.

The forty thousand clams will go to Shifino Lee Advertising & Branding Inc. to make some kind of program to show complete idiots how to vote. You may now bury your head in your hands.

A question, or two.

As much as $40,000 in public money needs to be extended to teach people how to pick a candidate for office?

And if such a public education program is necessary, doesn't Buddy Johnson have employees already on the payroll who are qualified to go out into the community to teach people how to cast a ballot?

Job Description

After all, isn't Johnson the SUPERVISOR OF ELECTIONS?!?!?!

Isn't it part of the job description of the supervisor of elections to ..., well, you know, supervise elections?

Yes, a thousand hanging chads yes, Florida has hardly bathed itself in glory when it has come to what would appear to be the elegantly simple act of going to the polls and casting ballots.

Admittedly this state has, at times, made such a mess of its banana republic elections kerfuffles it makes Cuba seem like the mother lode of Jeffersonian democracy. Fair enough.

But it isn't as if these voting machines compare favorably to a nuclear reactor, or a Death Star, or even the operating instructions of a VCR in terms of user-friendly complexity.

Hand-Wringing

You go to the polls, select what public trough-feeder you prefer, and that is pretty much that.

Every election cycle we go through all manner of fretting and hand-wringing as complaints pile up over malfunctioning machines, voters who profess to being completely flummoxed by the process, and even poll workers who appear to have been trained by Chicago funeral parlors on how to count the votes of citizens who haven't drawn a breath since the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

The new machines require the voter to fill in a bubble next to the candidate's name, which is then fed through a scanner to record the ballot. That's it. Voters don't need an advanced degree in physics, nor do they have to fight rabid badgers, nor do they have to run an obstacle course at the polls.

Having a pulse and functioning brain stem ought to be all that is required to handle the demands of voting.

Nevertheless, Johnson is going to spend $40,000 in federal tax dollars to hire an outside "expert" to educate people on how to fill in a - BUBBLE!!!!!!

At the risk of committing naivete, people can't be this dense, this clueless, this intimidated to figure out how to fill in a cockamamie bubble. Right?

On second thought, maybe we really don't want to know the answer. Sigh.

Keyword: Book of Ruth, to read and comment on Daniel Ruth's blog.

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