Let no one doubt that one vote matters.
Here in St. Johns County, in 2016, Paul Waldron defeated Jerry Cameron for St. Johns County Commission by seven (7) votes, as determined in a recount.
Footnote: It was technically in a Republican Primary, which should have been a Universal Primary required by a 1998 Constitutional Amendment adopted by Florida voters. SJC REC routinely closes Universal Primaries by routinized use of a loophole created by controversial Republican Secretary of State KATHERINE HARRIS and advocated by election lawyer MARK HERRON. In 2016, five (5) phony write-in candidates in four (4) local election races were procured by ROBERT THORNTON SMITH, alleged serial fraudfeasor prosecuted for writing a bad check to Screen Arts for $3700 worth of 2012 primary signs for Newt Gingrich. A single dupe who SMITH signs up to run as a "write-in" is enough to disenfranchise from local elections the majority of St. Johns County voters who are either registered Democrats or who have "No Party Affiliation" (NPA). That's all because of HARRIS' strained misinterpretation, adopted by courts on urging of HERRON, allowing one-party rule in North Florida and South Florida, where Republicans and Democrats prevent constitutionally required Universal Primaries. Naturally, the Constitution Revision Commission declined to put a clarification on the amendment on the ballot 20 years after voters spoke in favor of Universal Primaries. Disorganized St. Johns County Democratic leaders have not nominated a candidate for countywide partisan elected office since 2006.)
Why one vote matters: As of this writing, there's no final answer as to who will be our U.S. Senator, Governor or Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Recounts and litigation are continuing in these close races. There are great differences in the candidates and approaches. More than eight million votes were cast in Florida in 2018.
Take your vote seriously:
Incredibly, some 30% of the registered voters here in St. Johns County, Florida did NOT vote this year. Some 70% did vote, which is considered a record turnout.
Among voters, common mistakes can result in votes not counting:
o Some voters fill in ovals incompletely, or use pencils, both of which optical scanners may miss. Use a pen. Fill in ovals completely. Follow instructions, please.
o Some voters fail to vote in every race (an "undervote") or vote twice ("an overbite"). These undervotes and overvotes don't count, unless some other marking appears and there is a hand recount.
Then there are votes wasted on frivolous write-in candidates. Yesterday's hand recount revealed that some St. Johns voters wrote in uncountable unregistered U.S. Senate write-in "candidates, including Mickey Mouse, Minny Mouse, Bozo and Alex Trebeck as write-ins, instead of choosing either Senator Bill Nelson or Governor Rick Scott. Those votes don't count either. As a protest, such votes are ineffectual.
Thanks to Jim Obergefell for sharing this article on Facebook -- here's The Washington Post report about a 2018 state legislative race decided by one vote in Eastern Kentucky:
‘A win’s a win’: Kentucky lawmaker wins statehouse seat by a single vote
People vote at the Carnegie/Eva Farris Education Center in Covington, Ky., on Nov. 6. (Meg Vogel/Cincinnati Enquirer/AP)
Have you ever thought a single vote doesn’t really count?
Well, you’d be wrong — at least, if you voted in Kentucky.
More specifically, in Kentucky’s state House District 13, where Democratic candidate Jim Glenn beat the incumbent, Republican Rep. D.J. Johnson, by a very narrow margin: 6,319 people voted for Glenn, and 6,318 voters cast their ballots for Johnson.
To put it another way: “I won by one vote,” Glenn said in a phone interview Friday with The Washington Post. “But a win’s a win — whether it’s by one vote or 1,000.”
Johnson could not immediately be reached for comment by The Post, but he told the Associated Pressthat he had not been asking friends and family members whether they neglected to go to the polls.
“If someone came up and said that to me, I certainly wouldn’t hold them guilty,” he said. “I have fought that urge to second-guess. I know I ran the best campaign I could.”[The teen who messed up his absentee ballot, creating Virginia’s previous tied race]
No one knows who cast the crucial vote in the 13th District, but Glenn said more than two dozen people had approached him since Nov. 6 “and told me that they were the one vote that I won by.”
Mary Beverly Goetz, from Owensboro, Ky., said she knows that one vote does indeed matter — because she cast her vote for Glenn.
The 76-year-old Democrat, who said she is disabled and uses a walker, noted that she always votes in major elections and that even though her health issues have kept her from the polls in recent years, she has still voted, using absentee ballots. Goetz said she mailed in her ballot a couple of weeks before the election.
“I voted for Jim Glenn, because I believed he would be the right person to be in office,” Goetz told The Post, adding, “I’m glad he won, and I’d vote for him again.”
Glenn represented the district from 2006 to 2017, when Johnson won the seat. This month, Glenn reclaimed it.
Glenn represented the district from 2006 to 2017, when Johnson won the seat. This month, Glenn reclaimed it.
The votes were recanvassed Thursday, meaning that the votes from machines were reviewed and upheld by the county’s board of elections, and the state’s board of elections will meet next week to approve the results, according to the Associated Press.
But Johnson said it’s not over yet.
“It went as expected. I didn’t expect any changes,” he told TristateHomepage.com about the recanvassing. “At this point, we’re still in the process, step one. I’m meeting with the team, talking with them to consider a recount.”
Other close elections have similarly made national headlines.
Late last year, a political battle played out between Democrat Shelly Simonds and Republican David Yancey for a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates.
On Election Day, Yancey appeared to win the race by 10 votes, but a recount put Simonds ahead by one vote. The next day, a three-judge recount court ruled that a single ballot that had been discarded during the recount should be tallied for Yancey. The race was tied with each candidate having 11,608 votes.A state election official broke the tie last Thursday by picking Yancey’s name out of a stoneware bowl, a random drawing required under Virginia law.Since then, the state’s political class waited for Simonds to decide whether to seek a second recount, a question she resolved at 11:15 a.m. Wednesday when she tweeted: “It is with great disappointment that I am conceding the election to David Yancey.”
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