Election? What Election? Low Turnout Could Bode Ill for Rick Scott

Rick Scott's 11th-hour plea for Florida voters to head to the polls may have fallen on deaf ears.

As of 5 p.m., with two hours until the polls close, supervisors of elections were reporting generally light turnout.

Some of that may be due to higher levels of early- and absentee-voting. Some of it may have been due to the damp and dreary weather. But either way, today's numbers were nowhere near what Scott and others might have hoped for.

According to conventional wisdom, Scott, who is battling Attorney General Bill McCollum for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, needed a big day at the polls to overcome McCollum's party-powered machine.

Scott spokesman Joe Kildea said turnout in the state has been "all across the board," but he could not confirm one GOP source's calculation that Scott needed a turnout of 1.7 million voters in order to win.

The polls weren't particularly busy in two Republican strongholds on Florida's East Coast.

As of 3:30 p.m., Indian River County had tallied just 7,811 ballots. That compared poorly with voter turnouts of 14,000 and 16,000 in the 2006 and 2008 primaries, said local Supervisor of Elections Kay Clem.

Likewise, Martin County's total turnout might not hit 25 percent, said Supervisor Vicki Davis.

BTW: If Twitter postings were votes, Scott would be winning in a landslide. Since noon, his campaign was out-tweeting McCollum 12-1.