This morning in Miami-Dade County, Naylette Soublette went to vote at the same precinct where she’s been voting since she was 18. The marketing professional and daughter of Cuban immigrants didn’t expect her choice of candidates to be inspected by a poll worker. But as she was inserting her ballot into the reader, a poll worker asked her who she voted for. Surprised by the question, she didn’t answer,. The poll worker then looked down at the ballot she was holding, and said in Spanish something that translated to, “I could kill you for voting that way. How could you do that? You shouldn’t do that.” The comment was not a threat, Soublette said, but she was concerned that it was out-of-line for a poll worker, and might be happening to other people. “It’s not his place to ask me who I voted for and it’s definitely not his place to look at my ballot,” Soublette said. “Had it been someone who agreed with me, I would still have taken offense.” After casting her ballot, she followed a fellow voter to the same poll worker, who was handing out “I Voted” stickers. He told her she didn’t “deserve to wear a sticker,” she said. “I felt intimidated. Basically, it was more of a shock than anything.” She called her local elections board to complain about the incident, at which point they said they’d “take care of it,” but she wasn’t told of any action taken. Soublette also called the McCain campaign’s election hotline to report the incident. “It’s not about me. This is about what’s going on at the polls. I just am concerned that if there are people doing this out there, what else are they doing and who else are they affecting,” she said. Miami-Dade County was the epicenter of chad counting and butterfly ballot sorting during the 2000 presidential election, and has since moved from butterfly ballots to no-touch electronic voting, and then to paper ballots with an optical scanner. Past problems with poll workers and close election results, including issues in its Aug. 26 primary, have meant beefed up training for Florida’s 8,000 poll workers. According to press reports, there’s been at least one other complaint of a poll worker looking at a voter’s completed ballot, which spurred one elections supervisor to instruct poll workers to avert their eyes:
A call to Miami-Dade’s elections board spokesperson was not returned, and no one who answered calls was able to tell me if there was a procedure in place for dealing with such poll worker violations. Soublette was not convinced Miami-Dade was dealing with the problem. “I am just a citizen trying to do my civic duty. I just want things to be done correctly,” she said.
