Today the City of Kissimmee will determine the order of qualified candidates on the ballot for the elections that are set for the end of August. Placing names on the ballot in an order determined by a random lottery was the brainchild of Commissioner Jerry Gemskie during the last round of charter change discussions. Many of our readers will remember that these charter changes were the ones decided on by the commissioners that a charter review committee was not allowed to discuss. Commissioner Gemskie still suffering from his youthful scars of being alphabetically average, passionately spoke about the need for fairness in the electoral process. We would have to agree with Mr. Gemskie that the community's luck with competent elected officials has been about as good as winning a round of bingo. Just look at how far forward our current commission has brought our community and most residents would take their chances with the blind odds of fate any day. By the end of today, our fates will be sealed by happenstance of a few colorful balls.One important note on this entry is the coverage that Mark Pino, blogger extrodinare, from the Orlando Sentinel gave this topic. The headline was "Osceola will use luck of the draw to set ballot order." We have noted on many past articles that it would be nice if the media could actually figure out the difference between Osceola and Kissimmee. We know that Mr. Pino's journalistic skills have probably been dampend by his current blogging assignments, but simple geography is not that difficult. Now we are going to have a few voters (assuming there are still a few that read the Sentinel) in Osceola County who think that races that effect them are going to be affected by this same bingo based ballot business. Next time please look at a map.
5 comments:
Most of the commission just wanted to make sure John Cortes did not get elected. That is the many reason for the ballot system.
Even though they are going to draw ping pong balls, this will not be fair. Someone will win and then they will supposedly have an unfair advantage because of the luck of the draw. This is just a way so that some people with higher alphabetic names have a chance to be first on the ballot. It is not about fairness, it is about someone trying to get a better chance.
If you truly want fairness, all you have to do is rotate all the names on each ballot. That way in a 4 way race, everyone will be first 25% of the time. And it would not cost hardly anything more because of the quantities being printed.
So let's not talk about fairness. This random selection is still unfair.
I vote that we start calling him Jerry "Commissioner Bingo" Gemskie
They don't care where Kissimmee is. They mess this up all the time because if it is in Kissimmee or Osceola county it must be bad anyway.
So the random ballot order will only apply to City of Kissimmee elections & not the County ones?
That is confusing
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