Politics

The City Beautiful has begrudgingly decided to accept the working man's auto.  

On Election Day, voters in Coral Gables voted to end the city's 50-year old prohibition on overnight parked trucks.  The question whether to keep the law was put on the ballot by citizens (unlike the 11 state constitutional amendments).   

Daniel Smith, a professor at the University of Florida and expert on election data, says that Florida's new voting law, which cut early voting days from 14 to 8 days, limited voter participation among minorities.

Smith had long warned legislators that last year's voting law would disproportionately affect minority voters, who use early voting significantly more than other groups.

He says that his warnings months ago were right.

Former Gov. Charlie Crist is standing with state Democrats in favor of a bill to fix election problems that embarrassed the state last week.

State Rep. Darryl Rouson of St. Petersburg is the House sponsor of the bill, which would restore early voting to 14 days and allow non-government buildings to be used as early voting site.

Crist's name continues to surface as a possible Democratic challenger to Gov. Rick Scott in 2016. He has left the Republican Party and remains an independent who likes to call himself "Citizen Crist."

South Florida Democratic candidates who had no reason to expect victory are preparing to be sworn in to office now thanks to the votes of people whom the pollsters largely ignored: unlikely voters.

On Election Day this year, Florida went from having zero openly gay lawmakers in the state Legislature to two.

David Richardson won a seat in the Florida House representing Miami Beach and Joe Saunders won a seat representing a part of Orlando. Both men are openly gay.

Up until last week, Florida was the biggest state in the U.S. to have never elected an openly gay person to office in their state legislature. 

Chuck Wolfe, president of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, says that Florida was actually part of a national trend.

Gov. Rick Scott-- the man who spent his own money traveling the country in an effort to stop health care reform-- has announced he is actually going to work with the federal government to implement the health care reform law in Florida.

Since the 2010 health care law was passed, Florida officials and Scott have dragged their feet in implementing the health care law here. They have even turned away millions of dollars allocated through the law that would go to programs that help low-income women and children.

However, things have since changed.

In this past election, only three of the 11 proposed changes to the Florida Constitution on this year's ballot actually passed.

The ballot measures covered issues like tax cuts, the Florida Supreme Court, abortion and public funding of religious groups.

There are a lot of theories as to why this happened: a historically long ballot might have fatigued people by the time they got to the ballot measures, the amendments themselves were lengthy and confusing, lines were too long and polling places were chaotic, etc.

Florida voters waited almost a week to hear who won the presidential election in Florida. It wasn’t until Saturday, Nov. 10 that President Obama had been declared the winner.

According to the Florida Division of Elections, only 67 percent of registered voters in Miami-Dade County cast a ballot in this election. This includes people who waited in line at the polls, and people who voted via absentee ballot.

Statewide, this number hovers around 71 percent, which is the lowest turnout in the past three presidential elections.

Following this year's close presidential election here in Florida, there were reports that Obama had won the Cuban vote, or at least he had gotten a record share of it.

However, some political researchers and professors here in South Florida don't agree that this election represented a historic shift for South Florida's Cuban-Americans -- a population that has historically voted in favor of the GOP.