The Florida Supreme Court announced Nov. 6 that it would hear appeals by two motorists who are contesting the legality of red-light camera citations issued before July 2010; if everything goes their clients' way, attorneys say thousands of citizens could collectively receive millions in refunds.
Florida's final tally isn't in yet, and Romney has lost the presidential election with or without its coveted electoral votes, but spokespersons for the state's largest third parties insist they are the reason the Republican nominee did not carry the Sunshine State.
In a decisive rebuke to the constitutional agenda of the Republican-dominated Florida Legislature, voters have rejected all but three of the 11 amendments put before them on the general election ballot.
Amendments 2, 9, and 11 passed the required 60 percent threshold of voter support. They each extend homestead exemptions to special classes of persons: respectively, wounded veterans, surviving spouses of servicemen and first responders killed in the line of duty, and low-income seniors.
The rest did not even pass with a simple majority. They were:
Three controversial Florida Supreme Court justices have won retention to their seats on the state's high court, despite a high-profile campaign against them by critics who insisted they were left-wing activists unworthy of their office.
With about 91 percent of precincts reporting their vote totals, Justices Barbara Pariente, R. Fred Lewis, and Peggy Quince each received about 68 percent YES votes, a margin of victory well within the historic average. No Florida judge has ever lost a retention race.
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., 70, has won a third term, claiming some 55 percent of the vote with 54 percent of the Sunshine States precincts reporting their vote tallies. Four-term Republican congressman Connie Mack IV pulled in about 42 percent of the vote total.
Are you black, or a woman? If so, you can't cast a vote for your U.S. senator. But that's OK. No one else can, either.
Such was the state of affairs from 1787 to 1913. Few Americans today know that for the first 126 years of the nations existence, United States senators were not popularly elected. Rather, they were appointed or elected by every states legislature. The U.S. Senate was intended to be a quasi-aristocratic check on the much more directly democratic U.S. House of Representatives, whose members were popularly elected.
The Florida director of a conservative advocacy group is demanding the resignation of the Palm Beach County elections supervisor after reports Tuesday that yet another ballot print snafu has struck the county that Time magazine once called the Capital of Florida Corruption.
The Palm Beach Post reported Tuesday that some 500 faulty absentee ballots were mailed out by Democratic elections supervisor Susan Buchers office. The ballots contain duplicates of three Amendment questions, and omit another one entirely.
