Making Every Vote Count

Originally written: December, 2007
Making Every Vote Count

I got an appointment with my local elections supervisor here in Ft Lauderdale Florida, Dr. Brenda C Snipes. The purpose of my visit (a month or so ago), was to tell her about Count US In, and to elicit some information from her on how Broward County handled absentee balloting. In a nutshell, I was impressed.

Broward County was one of the Florida counties that didn’t do right by our military voters in the 2000 national election. I’ve posted some links below that explain what happened for those of you who want a bit more info. The info comes from a guy named Capt. Samuel F. Wright, JAGC, USNR. . I’ve spoken to him, and read some of his work. I found him most credible—a retired military attorney who still practices law and still carries on the work of counting the military vote.

But I don’t think we still have the problem of votes not being counted, at least not here in Broward County--at least not on Dr Snipes’ watch. Dr Snipes runs a tight ship even though she is pretty new to the election front. She was appointed to replace a supervisor who was fired, then was elected in her own right in 2004?. Taking point on absentee voting in Broward County is Mary Hall. Mary is a military spouse, and has relatives in the Navy now, so she has more than a little understanding of the problems the military faces in getting their votes in, and getting them counted--quite a respectable showing for our team here in this little part of the world.

Everything the two said during our visit was spot on. They want your votes. They take extraordinary care to ensure it gets processed properly, and they want to facilitate the exercise of your civic duty. I don’t know if other local election commissions have the same level of professionalism—and if they do, we want to hear about it. If they don’t, we’d like to help them.. But, for those of you who sent your votes in to Broward County, either by mail or fax (Broward doesn’t use email yet—only a handful of states do and only 25 use fax), you can be sure its going to be counted.

Now a word or two for those of you who didn’t vote: What the hell were you thinking?
America wants to know where you stand while you’re standing out there in the trenches, defending this, and other countries’ right to vote.

Don’t let us down on this. Count US In is dedicated to making sure your vote counts, and in the case of Broward County Florida, it does. We are developing an organization to check up on all the election commissions in the country, and we will keep after them.