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Uh, Where Was Buddy Again?

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By Daniel Ruth

druth@tampatrib.com

Published: November 4, 2008

For a fleeting moment there I started to get a bit verklempt at the sight of all those voter documents scattered along Interstate 4.

Alas, a bit of Chicago, it seemed, had arrived, just like the first blush of fall, upon our fair village's election season.

Some people anxiously await the first flakes of snow. Political junkies get wistful over the first hint of potential election fraud. Think of it as appreciating one's inner Mayor Richard Daley.

Ironic, isn't it, that the I-4 corridor, long regarded as vital to winning the state of Florida's 27 Electoral College votes, would also offer up the intriguing visual of spilled boxes containing the names of voters, registration numbers, precinct assignments, a survey indicating who the individual preferred in the presidential election and whether they might need a ride to cast their ballot today.

Admit it, the minute you heard about this story, the first thought that crept into your head was - "Oh dear, what has poor Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson gone and done now?"
Paper Blizzard
After all, Johnson has been sort of the polling booth's answer to the bumbling Michael Scott of "The Office," haplessly lurching to one embarrassing boo-boo after another.

Somehow, it was irresistible not to imagine Johnson himself driving along I-4 in a Supervisor of Elections van and forgetting to close the back door, leading to a blizzard of paper covering the roadway behind him.

And that explains why Johnson's office leaped into action, noting they had absolutely NOTHING to do with hundreds of thousands of pages of documents blowing in the wind on I-4 and knew absolutely NOTHING about who was responsible for the trash.

You do have to admit that if Johnson had indeed been at fault for the paper pile-up, the resulting tidal wave of files would have been at least several miles long. There are such things as standards, you know.

Some conspiracy wackos might look at the mountain of files spread along a piece of I-4 and conjure all manner of dark, evil intentions.

Making Mischief

But considering that all the dumped material were public records anyway, about the worst thing you can say about whoever was responsible was that they were untidy.

Why, you would have to be a complete idiot to try to destroy ballots before they were cast. That would be like robbing a bank and only stealing deposit slips.

Wait a minute! Just where was Buddy Johnson again when all this happened on I-4?

Or perhaps this was merely a practice run for Election Day night when the hobgoblins of democracy sometimes come out to make mischief on the voting process.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but considering the voluminous white noise of the endless television commercials, the lies and innuendos and distortions filling up our mailboxes, and the blah-blah-blah, yada-yada-yada of the stump speeches, perhaps in its own strange way, maybe it's only fitting that on the last day of the 2008 campaign, the most important piece of real estate in the nation for determining the next president of the United States would find itself full of electoral litter.

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

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