FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — It appears that, while I was watching the president this afternoon, I missed another big moment in the ongoing mess that is the early voting being conducted here in the World's Greatest Democracy, when all hell broke loose down in Miami-Dade county. The nonpartisan, but very conservative, mayor of Miami jumped in with both feet, with entirely predictable results....

Elections officials, overwhelmed with voters, locked the doors to their Doral headquarters and temporarily shut down the operation, angering nearly 200 voters standing in line outside — only to resume the proceedings an hour later. On the surface, officials blamed technical equipment and a lack of staff for the shutdown. But behind the scenes, there was another issue: Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez. The Republican had never signed off on the additional in-person absentee voting hours in the first place. "That was counter to what I said on Friday, which was we were not going to change the game mid-stream," he said. "I said, 'No, there's no way we did this.'" But Gimenez, who is in a nonpartisan post, quickly realized it was better to let the voting go on, and the voting resumed.

It seems that some officials in Doral decided to do something resembling the right thing, and they found a way to let people vote today. At which point, clearly addled, or hearing it from Governor Bat Boy up in Tallahassee, Gimenez managed to add incompetence to an obvious political finagle:

Gimenez said his initial reaction was to stop the last-minute Sunday voting. But by then, around 180 people stood in line outside the elections office at 2700 NW 87th Ave. They shouted "Let us vote!" and banged on the locked glass doors. "This is America, not a third-world country," said Myrna Peralta, who waited in line with her 4-year-old grandson for nearly two hours before the doors closed. "They should have been prepared." "My beautiful Sunshine State," she lamented. "They're not letting people vote." Minutes earlier, a department spokeswoman had said the office did not have enough resources — only one ballot printer, five voting booths and two staffers — to handle the throng of voters and would begin turning new voters away. "We had the best of intentions to provide this service today," spokeswoman Christina White had said. "We just can't accommodate it to the degree that we would like to." Calvin Sweeting, a 59-year-old from Opa-locka, was told he would be the last person to vote.

Ah, but meanwhile, across the street...

Nearly all the voters stayed in line until a campaign worker reported her car had been towed from a private parking lot across the street. Scores of people ducked out of the line to check on their own cars. A second car had been towed.

My head may explode.

Behind closed doors were back-and-forth phone calls among the department, the county attorney's office and the mayor, who eventually decided to let the people outside the elections department vote. Democrats also unleashed a torrent of phone calls to reporters and the county. "I'm upset at this change, but at the end, when you have 200, 300 voters out there ready to go, you really can't disenfranchise them," Gimenez said. Of the whole situation, he added: "I'm certainly embarrassed." The elections office reopened its doors at 3 p.m., after being closed for about an hour, apologizing and announcing that it had added a ballot-printing machine and more poll workers and would remain open until all voters in line at 5 p.m. had cast their in-person absentee ballots.

Up in Broward County, where the local Democrats went to court the truncated early-voting period, as of five o'clock Sunday night, they hadn't even found a judge who would hear the case.

It just should be easier than this to vote. It just should be. At the end of the president's speech, I was standing on the press riser with White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, who was keeping up with all of this on her BlackBerry. "Why are we arguing about voting in the United States of America in 2012?" she asked. She had me there.

(Also: We should send out props to Patricia Mazzei of the Miami Herald, whose real-time Twitter feed on the craziness in Doral should win some awards.)

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MORE FROM EARLY VOTING IN FLORIDA: In Line for the Early Voting That Wasn't, Florida Democrats Sue to Extend Early Voting Overnight, and the Bomb Scare

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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