Updates from the Office of the Supervisor of Elections – Change of Hours
5-10-12
We have changed our office hours to better serve the voters of Madison County from 7:30 to 5:30 but if these hours will not work please call my cell, 850-545-7228, and I will make arrangements to meet with you.
Thank you,
Thomas “Tommy” Hardee
Madison County Supervisor of Elections
1-16-12
Click here for a sample ballot
Tommy,
Thank you for ensuring that professionalism and customer service came first in the Primary and the General Elections. I extend the congratulations of the Madison County Democratic Executive Committee to you and to each candidate who qualified to run for office this year. And I encourage every reader of MadisonFloridaVoice to take an active interest in local, state, national, and international affairs. The Madison County Republican Party is fortunate to have J. P. Maultsby as chair. I encourage every voter to be active. Precinct workers are essential. “All politics is local.”
Elections are won by encouraging people to vote for you.
I encourage Democrats to be active locally. The 2014 elections will be interesting. See my post about the Madison County Democratic Executive Committee – will be posted by Wednesday, November 28.
Jim Catron, Chair
Madison County Democratic Executive Committee
P O B
Tommy,
Good job on running your first major election. Whether we (us,the public) agree on all the results, the process was still smooth in our county and I trust the numbers were correct. To me that is as important as who wins. America at it’s best. Keep up the good work!
The “state of poverty” was first recognized by the government in July, 1963? ” need annexed itself to the national census like some malignant 51rst state”? What in the hell is this nonsense? Did this mean you did not get an EBDB card for free food? Please don’t tell me you didn’t get a free cell phone. It does not surprise me that the government did not recognize poverty until the 60″s. But I suspect that there were still plenty of folks reeling from the 30″s that could have explained it to them. Lyndon Johnson, viper that he was, did more damage to this country than the Corps of Engineers, certainly one of our most destructive government agencies.
LBJ’s “War on Poverty” and “Great Society” are responsible for a lot more of the mess we have now than Obama, who is just trying to nudge the ball over the goal line with his nose. No one is denied the right to vote who has that right. If you care, vote. If you don’t, don’t. Kind of like changing the channel if you don’t like the show.
Identification requirements in the Florida Statutes, read in part, as follows:
101.043 Identification required at polls.—
(1)(a) The precinct register, as prescribed in s. 98.461, shall be used at the polls for the purpose of identifying the elector at the polls before allowing him or her to vote. The clerk or inspector shall require each elector, upon entering the polling place, to present one of the following current and valid picture identifications:
1. Florida driver’s license.
2. Florida identification card issued by the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.
3. United States passport.
4. Debit or credit card.
5. Military identification.
6. Student identification.
7. Retirement center identification.
8. Neighborhood association identification.
9. Public assistance identification.
(b) If the picture identification does not contain the signature of the elector, an additional identification that provides the elector’s signature shall be required. The address appearing on the identification presented by the elector may not be used as the basis to confirm an elector’s legal residence or otherwise challenge an elector’s legal residence. The elector shall sign his or her name in the space provided on the precinct register or on an electronic device provided for recording the elector’s signature. The clerk or inspector shall compare the signature with that on the identification provided by the elector and enter his or her initials in the space provided on the precinct register or on an electronic device provided for that purpose and allow the elector to vote if the clerk or inspector is satisfied as to the identity of the elector.
(c) When an elector presents his or her picture identification to the clerk or inspector and the elector’s address on the picture identification matches the elector’s address in the supervisor’s records, the elector may not be asked to provide additional information or to recite his or her home address.
(2) If the elector fails to furnish the required identification, the elector shall be allowed to vote a provisional ballot. The canvassing board shall determine the validity of the ballot pursuant to s. 101.048(2).
I have a photo ID, so I have not been paying as close attention to this discussion as I might if I did not. However, I think that I remember hearing on the news that this kind of state legislation is being challenged in the courts as unconstitutional as it seems it could exclude those from voting who do not or cannot drive. Until a final legal decision is rendered, I am pretty sure it is illegal to enforce it as law.
Clarification, please. Thanks.
On this day, let’s all have a dream and be sure to Vote and make it happen…Thanks Super Tommy, Supervisor of Elections.
Biography
Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family’s long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.
In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.
In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, “l Have a Dream”, he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.
At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.
On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
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Economic equality a part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream By Bruce Newman – follow him at Twitter.com/BruceNewmanTwit.
bnewman@mercurynews.com http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_19749843
The state of poverty was first officially recognized by the U.S. government in July 1963 — one month before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his soaring “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In the years that followed, need annexed itself to the national census like some malignant 51st state.
Devised by an economist at the Social Security Administration, the poverty threshold became a way of reckoning the “economic justice” for which King would campaign before he died in 1968. Though his leadership of the civil rights movement is the most memorable aspect of his legacy, King was in Memphis trying to help propel black sanitation workers into the middle class when he was assassinated.
But 44 years later, economic justice remains elusive for many Americans. While poverty gradually declined in the decades since King’s death — 32.4 million Americans lived below the threshold in 1986, the year the King holiday was first celebrated — the numbers have climbed in recent years as the economy soured.
Today, as the nation celebrates MLK Day for the 27th time, 46.2 million of its people have slid into the misery that King spent his final years fighting, with blacks experiencing the highest rate of any group: 27 percent.
“I’m sure that would cause him anguish,” said Taylor Branch, author of “America in the King Years,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning trilogy that spans King’s transformation from preacher to prophet. “But
he never spoke of poverty in purely racial terms. King said poverty is no respecter of persons or race.”
King’s legacy as civil rights champion was carved in stone again this summer with the dedication of his memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. But for the two generations of Americans that have grown up since his death, King’s “Dream” speech has overshadowed his other work. Some fear that much of the economic justice message for which he was martyred has been lost.
“In some ways, things are worse than when Martin was alive,” said Clayborne Carson, founding director of the King Institute at Stanford University. “If he was concerned about the distribution of wealth in 1968, the lack of opportunity for poor people and the lack of commitment to eliminating poverty as a social problem at that point, it seems obvious that those issues have become more pressing today.”
Even the most notable economic advancement made by black Americans during the past four decades — the formation of a vast African-American middle class — has removed what King referred to as “the fierce urgency of now” from the plight of a larger underclass.
“It’s true that many black people have moved to the suburbs,” Carson said, “but in a sense that has exacerbated the problem. If you went to a King celebration at a large black church and gave one of his anti-poverty talks these days, it would not be well received. His kind of social gospel preaching is just not what works today.”
Events such as the annual Freedom Train trip from San Jose to San Francisco — whose distance matches the historic Selma to Montgomery march King led in Alabama in 1965 — reinforce his image as a racial leader, which is exactly where the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Association of Santa Clara Valley thinks it should remain.
“I believe we have to continue to keep his legacy in the forefront, or things could go back to the way they were,” said the group’s president, Bonita Carter-Cox. “Otherwise, he and other civil rights fighters could have done what they did in vain.”
There seems little chance of that. Carson believes not even King — if he were alive today — could live up to the “King myth” that conjures up a larger-than-life racial superhero, far removed from the “drum major for justice” celebrated by the King Memorial.
“When he was assassinated, it was national policy of the United States to abolish poverty,” Carson said, referring to President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” announced during his 1964 State of the Union speech. “Now if you were a presidential candidate and you proposed that, you would be eliminating yourself from serious consideration. That would be seen as something that’s totally unrealistic, utopian.”
Michael Honey, a historian who chronicled King’s campaign for economic justice in two books, said the civil rights leader’s fateful trip to Memphis was undertaken to improve job security and pension benefits. “And on that score we haven’t moved very far forward,” Honey said. “The assault now on public employee unions is directly hitting the black middle class.”
Though King’s eye was on the prize of civil rights until 1965, he began writing and speaking to union groups about the tyranny of poverty long before that. “What he says in those labor speeches is that the civil rights movement was the first phase of the freedom movement,” Honey said. “In fact, he saw that as a down payment. His basic point was that the idea of equality in the Declaration of
Independence was not just about civil rights. It was about everybody having an equal chance.”
When the current Occupy movement was finding its footing in places such as Oakland’s Frank H. Ogawa Plaza and Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco, an organizer called the King Institute to ask Carson whether it would be acceptable to invoke King’s legacy in the name of economic issues.
“I told them of course it was,” Carson said. “But the first thought that comes to mind for that generation is not that he was supporting the garbage workers’ strike in Memphis at the end of his life. That’s not part of the myth. I think what will happen is that gradually they will either affirm the holiday in its full meaning, or like so many other holidays it will be hardly noticed, a three-day weekend with department store sales.”
King on poverty
“Above all I see the preaching ministry as a dual process. On the one hand I must attempt to change the soul of individuals so that their societies may be changed. On the other I must attempt to change the societies so that the individual soul will have a change. Therefore, I must be concerned about unemployment, slums and economic insecurity. I am a profound advocator of the social gospel.”
– “Preaching Ministry,” 1948
“If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.”
– “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” 1968
“This will be the day when we shall bring into full realization the dream of American democracy — a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few….”
– AFL-CIO Convention, 1961
If a person doesn’t have a photo I.D, what else is acceptable to be eligible to vote?