As it happens, I very recently moved from Orlando, FL to Henderson, NV.  Wanting to be able to vote in the national election, I filled out the Absentee Ballot Request form.  The form had a place to enter my Florida address, and a place to enter my non-Florida address to which I wanted the ballot sent.  It happens that I was still paying rent in Orlando so technically my address was valid.  This was about a month ago.  Well, time passed.  I had a gallstone attack, I went in for surgery, and I spent a lot of time in bed, in pain.  When I was finally well enough to walk to my apartment complex's mail room, I did not find my ballot waiting for me.

So I called the Orange County Supervisor of Elections.  The person who answered the phone informed me that it was too late to request a ballot.  After repeating to her that I'd already requested the ballot, she checked their records and informed me that it was sent to my Florida address.   Does anyone see a problem here?  I asked her to re-send it.  This was on Thursday.  She informed me that she would send it again but that it probably wouldn't get to me on time.  I thanked her.  Click.  She'd hung up the phone.

As it happens, she was right.  I still don't have my ballot, and now it is too late to even overnight it.  But even if it weren't too late for that, it would still irk me to have to shell out the dough and not the Supervisor of Elections who had made the mistake in the first place.  For that matter, why couldn't they overnight the ballot to me so I'd have it by Friday?

I'm a CNN junkie, and it turns out they've set up a hotline so that folks can complain about just this sort of thing.  And so I did.  As it turns out, Florida voters have called in with the most complaints of any state.  You'd think that after the 2000 election, they would have their act together!  Sigh.

At least I know I'm not alone.  I would have voted for Barack.  Hopefully there is some kind of statistical fairness in their blundering resulting in an equal number of republican voters not receiving their ballots.

Here's the CNN link:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/03/voter.hotline/index.html