Dade mayor offers plans to ease voting wait times

MIAMI (WSVN) -- Miami-Dade County's mayor hopes his plans for future elections will ease wait times for voters in South Florida.

The Sunshine State once again presented itself in a negative light during the last presidential election, as problems at the polls, such as hours-long wait times in Miami-Dade County played a starring role. But Mayor Carlos Gimenez says he has a plan to fix it.

The long voting lines last November was particularly disastrous in the Brickell area and in Southwest Miami-Dade. Some people waited as much as seven to eight hours. But now, the mayor wants to see those times decreased to no longer than one hour.

The mayor met with an elections advisory group on Friday to make recommendations. Some of these recommendations would have to be approved by the State, but they would offer more early voting sites, expanding more early voting days, and even shorten the ballot language, a big issue in the last election.

Gimenez said he and the group want to do all they can to make these elections the best in the nation. "We're gonna have more early voting sites on these different elections where we know we have greater participation, so that will make it easier and faster for voters to vote early, and hopefully more voters will vote early, and then you will have less of a wait time on a election day."

The mayor says the changes that will be made will not be revealed until the end of summer. The next election voters should expect to notice changes should be in May of 2014, according to the mayor.

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