Another bad count in Florida

Yes, it would not be a Florida election without counting and processing problems. It's just that we've gotten used to these things happening after people have voted.

But now the first glitch of November's general election already is in progress. This time, it's not a problem of vote-counting, it's a problem of petition-counting. Two ballot initiatives may not get voted on because nobody's sure how many valid signed petitions have been turned in. And any petition not turned in by Feb. 1 just won't count.

Elections offices are swamped with signed petitions to process and the state has stopped posting the number of validated signed petitions counted so far because elections officials are unsure of the totals.

There are 49 ballot initiatives active in Florida. They range from dropping the voting age to 16 to doing away with all school boards. Few go anywhere.

But two are now close to their goals.

One would ban gay marriage or "the substantial equivalent thereof," whatever that is. (Yes, this is already disallowed by statute, but some want to make it doubly illegal, just to be sure.)

The other is the Hometown Democracy Amendment. It would require a local vote when a government makes major changes to its comprehensive land-use plan. Something that now happens whenever two guys in suits show up at a commission meeting, pass around architect's sketches and promise Big Things Ahead.

Some business groups, however, fear it would cause constant low-turnout votes on growth where an ill-informed electorate would put a screeching halt to normal development.

Supporters of the Marriage Protection Amendment announced they had enough signatures to get on the ballot. But then it was discovered that about 27,000 signed petitions from Miami-Dade County had been counted twice. Suddenly, the amendment was behind in the count.

The other amendment's problems are also complicated. Hometown Democracy says it collected 750,000 unverified signatures. At last count, however, its verified signatures fell more than 110,000 short of the almost 611,000 signatures needed.

Getting constitutional proposals to Florida voters is not as easy as critics of the process make out. And its gets harder each time the Legislature meets.

The rules for processing petition signatures have been tightened and the deadlines for turning them in pushed back. You can now even submit a form to take back your signature on a petition, and those forms, too, must be processed.

At some point the clock is going to run out on petition verification and it's easy to fear a lot of legitimate signed petitions will go uncounted.

As if to make sure that will happen, supporters of a proposal pushed by anti-Hometown Democracy groups, the Florida Growth Management Initiative, have been flooding election offices with their own signed petitions. This plan sounds as though it too would set up votes on planning but would, in fact, make such referendums all but logistically impossible.

You can make good arguments that none of these amendments is a good idea. But it should be the voters who turn them back, not a system designed to make them fail or a bureaucracy that's not equipped for the task.

Maybe we need a petition drive to protect petition drives.

mark.lane@news-jrnl.com