Moot Vote: Counting When It Doesn't Count

[Image courtesy of Flickr user lizfilardi]

At their root, elections provide a basic service to communities: a mechanism for making a decision through the aggregation of individual opinions expressed through voting.

But what happens when circumstances conspire to make the underlying decision moot, once the election process is already underway? That’s the question in South Florida lately with regard to a proposal to allocate tourist taxes to stadium renovations for the Miami Dolphins that collapsed when the Legislature declined to follow through. CBS4 Miami has more:

Nearly 60,000 people voted absentee or early on whether the Miami Dolphins should get tourist taxes for a major facelift of Sun Life Stadium.

But the legislature nixed the deal last Friday when the Speaker Will Weatherford, a Pasco County Republican, refused to allow it to be brought up. The election in Miami-Dade was called off as of the end of the day Friday.

So what would become of all those votes? Would they be counted, revealed, thrown out?

At Miami-Dade Elections headquarters there was confusion. No one could recall an election – already underway – being cancelled. Elections officials waffled. The ballots might be kept secret. They might be released. They might be destroyed.

Mayor Carlos Gimenez put an end to the confusion Tuesday in an interview with CBS4′s Gary Nelson.

“They are a public record,” the mayor said of the stadium ballots.

Which means [they] can be tallied and disclosed.

“They can be counted and then whatever the election was up to that point is a public record and can be made public,” Gimenez said.

A short time later, Deputy Elections Supervisor Christina White announced the results of the absentee and early votes on the stadium issue will be released on May 15th, the day after municipal elections in North Miami and Sweetwater which also include the Dolphins referendum item.

Miami-Dade Commissioner Jose “Pepe” Diaz told CBS4 News the partial vote should not be made public, because it will not necessarily reflect the overall sentiment of voters.

“When you have a limited group of people who voted, and others who didn’t vote, at the end of the day there is no vote,” Diaz said. “So it would be an unfair judgment of a situation.”

Something similar occurred in Washington, DC recently, where a candidate in the City’s at-large council election abruptly withdrew while his name was still on the ballot. Despite the fact that his chances of winning the vote were slim, there was still confusion (and ultimately no resolution) about what would happen if he did.

To me, the most interesting part about these stories is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a clear idea in law or practice about what to do when the underlying decision in an election is otherwise moot. I don’t know if it will prompt action by policymakers or if, like the approach to natural disasters, we will simply hope it doesn’t rain.

One other interesting side note that I will be watching over the next few weeks: Miami-Dade may end up with a sizable surplus of funds because of the stadium deal collapse.

[Mayor] Gimenez said since the Dolphins wrote a check for more than $4 million to cover the election, the county may see a windfall of upwards of $2 million due to the voting process being cut short. [emphasis added]

Do the Dolphins get some of their money back – especially since they aren’t (yet) able to upgrade their stadium? That’s just another question likely to arise in the aftermath of the election that ultimately wasn’t.