Luckily, it’s “only” Florida.
More than 12,500 voters received robocalls this morning from the Pinellas County, FL Supervisor of Elections office, letting them know that the deadline for turning in their absentee ballot was “tomorrow”, the day after the election. Unfortunately, the real deadline for turning in absentee ballots is 7pm today, Election Day, Tuesday, November 6th.
Pinellas County is home to Tampa and St. Petersburg. So here’s why this monumental screw-up, presuming that’s what it was, seems to have happened…
According to the Tampa Bay Times…
Here’s what happened, according to Nancy Whitlock, a spokeswoman for supervisor Deb Clark:
Pinellas officials used a Internet phone system called CallFire.com, to record messages reminding people of the deadline to turn in mail-in ballots.
On Monday, election officials sent out a reminder to 27,917 people saying ballots must be returned by 7 p.m. “tomorrow” “” or Tuesday. But for reasons unknown, 12,525 of those calls wound up in a queue and were not placed until between 8 and 8:30 a.m. this morning.
By then, “tomorrow,” referred incorrectly to Wednesday.
Luckily, Florida is never particularly close, so those calls won’t make much of a difference, right?
But no need to worry!…
Former Gov. Charlie Crist and his wife Carole were campaigning for President Barack Obama in Tampa this morning, when Mrs. Crist’s cell phone showed a call from Pinellas County. The robocall said polls would be open “tomorrow.”
“Unbelievable,” said the former governor.
Glad they tried to clear it all up. Who knows if it worked? That said, there is currently no notice of the foul-up anywhere on the front page of the Pinellas County, FL Supervisor of Elections website. You’d think they might like to add a big red notice on the page or something.
In Florida you can change another’s ballot, or do almost any crime if not all concerning voting or voting machine fraud and it is only a third degree misdemeanor!
What a state, throw trash into a vacant field and you get more of a slap on the wrist.
Steal an election, don’t worry it’s a small issue.
Tampa is in Hillsborough County. Having lived in the vicinity for twenty years, including spending twelve years in the Hillsborough County public schools, I’m 100 percent certain of this. St. Pete is terra incognita to those of us on the other side of the Bay, but I do believe they refer to that land over there as Pinellas County.
I received the incorrect Robocall in Pinellas. My take is that whoever wrote the script using the word “tomorrow” instead of “Tuesday” is the same person who was responsible for starting the calls at 8:34am Tuesday. Deborah Clark, Supervisor of elections, has refused to comment directly. Her written statement says that it was an innocent mistake and was corrected by 11:02am, but that was probably because the office was compelled after receiving complaints from the public. In a perfect world, the D.A. or FBI would interview everyone in the office including Deborah Clark and prosecute the guilty party for voter fraud (and perjury too if she was caught in a lie}.