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Letter to the editor

Plan for early voting snubs half the county

Look at any map of Pinellas County and it is easy to see that the county is roughly divided in half geographically by Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard in Clearwater. So it is inexplicable, offensive even, that when elections officials chose the polling places for early voting this month, they didn't pick any locations north of Gulf-to-Bay.

There are only three early voting locations in Pinellas: elections offices in the County Courthouse on Court Street in downtown Clearwater, in the Election Service Center at 13001 Starkey Road in Largo and in the County Building in downtown St. Petersburg.

For a resident of East Lake, the closest early voting location is an hourlong round trip across and down the county to the courthouse in downtown Clearwater.

Pack a lunch, people.

Early voting begins two weeks before Election Day at specified early voting locations (in Pinellas, you can vote from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. through this Saturday). Elections officials reduced the number of early voting locations in Pinellas from 11 in November 2006 to three because the state Legislature cut revenues for local governments.

"We had to cut something," said Nancy Whitlock, spokeswoman for the county elections office. "If you look around the state, you will see a lot of counties have done this."

What other counties have done is not the issue. The issue is whether elected Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark is providing appropriate access to early voting for the entire county she is supposed to serve.

She clearly is not. More than 300,000 people - about 32 percent of Pinellas County's population - live north of Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard.

Yet Clark decided to offer early voting only where state law requires that she do so - in the primary elections office and its branch offices - and all of those are on the south side of Gulf-to-Bay.

Pinellas County is unique in ways that should be taken into consideration when choosing early voting locations. It is a long, narrow peninsula. It is the most densely populated county in the state, with significant traffic congestion and a relatively poor network of major roads.

And pity the folks who don't own a car but want to exercise their right to vote early. Taking the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority bus from Tarpon Springs, for example, to one of the early voting sites could be a real ordeal.

The truth is that failing to identify an early voting location in North Pinellas effectively removes early voting as a reasonable option for much of the north county population.

Whitlock suggested there is another problem with offering early voting in North Pinellas. Since the county is converting to optical scan voting machines, the paper ballots used in those machines must be stored at the polling place. Storing all those ballots at a lot of early voting locations would be a security problem for the elections staff, she said.

That sounds more like an excuse than a reason. First, voters will not be using the optical scan machines for the Jan. 29 primary, so ballot storage will not be an issue. Second, adding just one or two early voting locations in North Pinellas doesn't seem like a big increase in the security burden. And, third, what does the elections office plan to do about ballot security in a general election, when literally hundreds of polling places are open?

The elections office says that if someone in North Pinellas wants to vote early and doesn't want to journey to one of the three sites, he or she can request a mail ballot and vote entirely by mail.

True, but the state mandated that early voting be offered to the voters of Florida to make voting more convenient. The election supervisor's decision not to provide at least one polling place in North Pinellas violates the spirit of that law.

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[Last modified January 22, 2008, 20:05:30]