The Election In Which Nobody Voted

Suprisingly, an election was held in Tamarac, Florida in which nobody voted this past Wednesday. Apparently none of the registered voters came to their precincts in the city to decide on the issue of annexing a nearly unincorpoated neighborhood. This latest eyebrow-raising shocker suggests that none of the 68 registered voters in the city believed that their vote was going to count anyway given their feeling that the system is rigged at their expense; therefore, they pondered what the point would be to go their precincts and vote on a proposal that they knew they would not benefit from it in the end.

What's even interesting about this incident is that none of the polling employees were incentivized to vote on the issue as well. It appears that their feelings regarding the proposal and the system of voting were mutual. Of course, the vote probably would have decided the fate of the neighborhood, but it's not as if they were interested in doing that anyway.

If the city really wanted the community to go through with the annexation, wouldn't they have somehow carried it out, the opposition of the electorate notwithstanding? That seems to be the case anyway, except that you won't hear the city officials willingly cop to that.

Here's an interesting excerpt in the AP report:

The cost of keeping a polling site open for 12 hours with no voters: $2,500.

Because the city lost that much money to keep the precinct open for that amount of time, wouldn't they have slapped a tax on the voters to recoup that loss, even if the electorate didn't want it? That revenue wouldn't have necessarily gone to make up for the loss of revenue during the entire time of the election on that day, and the officials probably would have raised that money to make it appear as if the money would have gone to make up the shortfall. Would they really have accomplished that? Not likely, but nothing what the government does, especially at the local level, would surprise anyone (including Yours Truly) at this or any other point.

Here's another disturbing part in that same report:

City officials could take another approach to annexing the area. One option is a mail-in ballot election.

I'm convinced that they would pursue this approach, given the fact that the election was a dud. However, I'm more convinced that, if the voters had shown up and the election was a dud and the vote totals produced an outcome that was unsatisfactory to the city officials, they would have taken another approach just the same because the outcome wasn't exactly what they wanted.