Boston, MA –
On Wednesday, Mitt Romney will participate in the Univision “Meet the
Candidates”
Forum at the University of Miami in Miami, Florida. He will then hold a
Juntos Con Romney Rally at Darwin Fuchs Pavilion in Miami, Florida. The
following events are open to the press.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Event: Governor Romney Participates In Univision “Meet the Candidates” Forum
Location: Bank United Field House
The University of Miami
Miami, Florida
Program Time:
6:30 PM EDT
***
Event:Governor Romney Holds Juntos Con Romney Rally
Florida became the battleground for the youth vote Monday, as Michelle Obama and the son of former Gov. Jeb Bush arrived within hours of each other on college campuses in Tallahassee and Gainesville hoping to drum up support for their candidates among pivotal young voters.
The First Lady spoke to a standing-room only crowd of 10,750 cheering supporters at the Stephen O’Connell Center at the University of Florida and then darted to Tallahassee to another packed house of 8,850 at the Leon County Civic Center.
“All our hard work, all the progress we’ve made is all on the line; it’s all at stake this November,” Obama told a rowdy crowd of supporters in Gainesville. “This election is even closer than the last one, and it could all come down to what happens in just a few battleground states like Florida.’’
She delivered a similar 30-minute speech in Tallahassee, and coached her audiences not to take a day off for the next 60 days and “work like you’ve never worked before.”
Part pep talk, part get-out-the-vote drive, Obama’s remarks also underscored the importance of registering to vote by the Oct. 9 deadline in Florida.
Four years ago, she said, her husband won by 236,000 votes in Florida. “That’s just 36 votes per precinct,’’ she said. “That could mean just one vote in your neighborhood, in your dorm, in your apartment.”
The greeting was more subdued for George P. Bush, son of Florida’s former governor and nephew of the former president, as he launched his six-college bus tour on behalf of the Maverick PAC, a political action committee designed to increase activism among young Republican professionals. Read more here.
First Lady Michelle Obama hit familiar notes as she spoke to an electric,
10,750-person crowd at the Stephen O’Connell Center in Gainesville Monday.
But for many students who waited hours for tickets to Obama’s speech and
filled the bleachers two hours early, you’d think it was 2008 all over again
and they were hearing the message for the first time.
“We’re all a part of something,” she said, the audience roaring. “With our
freedoms come obligations, and with our blessings comes our duty to give back to
those who have less.”
In an effort to drive out the youth vote that helped get her husband elected
in 2008, Obama stopped in Gainesville (before heading to Tallahassee) to implore
students to organize, to make phone calls, to knock on doors and to vote for her
husband.
“All our hard work, all the progress we’ve made is all on the line, it’s all
at stake this November,” she said. “This election is even closer than the last
one, and it could all come down to what happens in just a few battleground
states like Florida.”
In a TV ad sponsored by the Republican Party of Florida, Scott says, "I've listened to the frustrations parents and teachers have with the FCAT. Next year we begin improving our testing system. No more teaching to the test."
Is the state's move from FCAT to a new testing system a product of Scott listening to angry parents and teachers? No. Change was already coming. Read the fact-check and ruling here.
Scott often talks up the state's significant unemployment rate drop since he took office. Its decline since December 2010 is the nation's biggest.
"We have every reason to brag about what’s going on in our state," he said last week at an Enterprise Florida board meeting. "If you look at the fastest drop in unemployment, it’s down 2.3 (percentage points) in the last 20 months."
Scott's rosy statistic ignores the biggest factor behind the lowered unemployment rate: a labor force downsized by the exit of discouraged workers. That's not a positive economic indicator, experts say. Read our fact-check and ruling here.
A box of disputed ballots from, of all places, Palm Beach County,
arrives at the Tallahassee courthouse. Lawyers toss around terms like
"voter intent" and "the will of the voter." Hundreds of miles from where
the actual ballots were cast, a judge has to decide who's right.
Circuit Judge Terry Lewis didn't waste any time Monday.
As echoes of the 2000 presidential recount reverberated through the state capital, Lewis upheld Rep. Jeff Clemens' 17-vote victory over Rep. Mack Bernard in a razor-close Democratic primary for a state Senate seat in Palm Beach County.
In the courtroom, Lewis peered over 40 absentee ballots
that were rejected by the Palm Beach County canvassing board as
defective because the voters' signatures on the ballot envelope did not
resemble the same voters' signatures on file with the elections office.
"There's no way I can say that's the same signature," Lewis said after examining Elizabeth Williams' absentee ballot. After looking at Stephanie Sterling's ballot envelope, Lewis said: "Different 'S.'" Of Takia Duncan's ballot envelope, Lewis said: "Looks like a different signature to me as well."
Mack's lawyer, J.C. Planas, a former Miami
state representative, said Lewis was interpreting the law too narrowly.
He tried to present affidavits from 23 absentee voters who swore that
those were their ballots, but Lewis would not admit them into evidence.
Lewis said state election law -- changed after the 2000
recount that became a fiasco over determining "voter intent" -- is
clear: He can't sit in judgment of what a voter meant to do, and if he
views the local canvassing board's decisions as reasonable, he can't
overrule them. "I don't think I can go behind that," Lewis said.
As a result, for now, Clemens is poised to become the newest member of the Senate from Palm Beach County.
"It was clearly frivolous," Clemens said afterward of
Bernard's lawsuit. "They want to cherry-pick fraudulent votes that they
feel are favorable to them."
Lewis also reviewed nine disputed provisional ballots, but
did not allow them to be counted either. He noted that even if all nine
were for Bernard, it wouldn't change the outcome of the election. But he
wondered aloud why Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher didn't
count two provisional ballots from people who didn't bring a photo ID
to the polls, but whose signatures matched the signatures on file in her
office.
Planas said he planned an immediate appeal to the First District
Court of Appeal. Planas said some of the disputed ballots were cast by
Haitian-Americans who were confused by absentee ballot instructions,
which is why they may have printed their names on a document rather than
signed it.
Before launching her campaign for Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge, María Elena Verde got a clear recommendation from her political adviser: Keep boleteros — absentee-ballot brokers — at a distance.
“She gave me a list of names and told me not to talk to any of those people,” said Verde, who won her Aug. 14 race against Richard Coppel.
Despite the warning, Verde found herself appalled by the number of boleteros who approached her. During a visit to a Miami community center for the elderly, for instance, a woman asked her whether she had hired someone to collect absentee ballots on her behalf.
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Verde said she responded.
Without mentioning a fee, the woman pointed to community center’s kitchen and said: “This morning I was sitting in that kitchen filling out absentee ballots. I can put your name on the ballots.”
Several judicial candidates who ran in the Aug. 14 election recalled in dismay and disgust how boleterostook advantage of campaign events to offer their services. The ballot brokers behaved like vendors at a flea market, some candidates said, sometimes seemingly haggling among themselves on a deal.
Appalled by the assault, some candidates said they pretended not to know what was going on and even invented distractions, like cutting a cake, to get away from them.
