You know, one begins to wonder if Florida's Department of State should be allowed to do anything any more. At the very least, the people in charge of elections seem to be woefully incompetent.

Leahy: Unskilled workers to blame: Miami-Dade County officials lost faith Thursday in their own ballot count, saying a spot check of returns from Tuesday's botched primary revealed serious discrepancies that could require a re-examination of all 7,200 machines. [...] Gwen Margolis, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade County Commission and a member of the election canvassing board, predicted that returns from every machine in the county would have to be recounted. [...] One indication of serious trouble that materialized Thursday: Several Miami-Dade precincts, each with hundreds of registered voters, are listed as showing one or even no votes cast Tuesday, a virtual impossibility. Broward's tabulation shows at least one precinct with hundreds of registered voters and no votes cast.

The fun part is, depending on how comprehensive the various mechanical problems, are and the voter error, and the odd orneryminded poll worker, and the misplaced machines -- they misplaced entire voting machines? they misplaced more than one? what on earth are those people DOING down there? Anyway, depending on how comprehensive these various errors are (and it seems that they cover at least two counties), a recount might not merely make various elections closer, but might actually change results. It's virtually certain to force a full statewide recount for the Reno/McBride contest; there was already one race headed for a recount ... and sadly, it might lend some truth to Take Back Miami-Dade's claim that the gay rights amendment should have been far closer to repeal than the results showed.

The Herald notes that all this came about because Florida was trying to fix the problems that caused "the embarrassingly inept presidential election of 2000." It does seem that they've made things ever so much worse, doesn't it? "Embarrassingly inept" seems like it might be too mild a term to cover having two elections like this back to back.