Florida GOP Bait and Switch

It's April Fool's Day but Florida voters were fooled back in 2007 when Gov. Charlie Crist signed into law legislation banning electronic voting machines. The bill passed unanimously in the House and drew just two nay votes in the Senate.

Voting rights advocates (including the writer) cheered that Florida was ending its experiment with unreliable paperless voting machines. But we did not know that buried in the legislative boilerplate was a provision that would disenfranchise millions of voters:

Each political party other than a minor political party shall, on the last ~~second~~ Tuesday in January ~~March~~ in each year the number of which is a multiple of 4, elect one person to be the candidate for nomination of such party for President of the United States or select delegates to the national nominating convention, as provided by party rule.

In plain English, the presidential primary was switched from March 11 to January 29. And the rest is history.

Investigator reporter Wayne Barrett writes Republicans imposed their will on Democrats:

The Republicans don't just control both houses of the Florida legislature. Their combined 103-to-57 majority allowed them to dictate the terms of the bill that moved the primary to January 29. It is true that all but one of the state's Democratic legislators supported the bill. But a closer look reveals that vote to be more an indication of a realistic and productive compromise with the ruling Republicans than any intent to breach Democratic rules.

Florida's leading news outlets, just like Michigan's, converted an early primary into a matter of state patriotism, and that point of view, coupled with the mathematical inability to even slow the Republican push, forced Democrats to roll over.

Barrett's piece is headlined "Could the Republicans pick the Democratic nominee?" Yes, they could. The question is: Should Democrats let them?