Plant City Republican Rich Glorioso is gunning for the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections office, and he thinks he can make the case against Democrat Craig Latimer.
Latimer is the chief-of-staff to the current officer in charge, Dr. Earl Lennard. Lennard announced over a year that he would not run for re-election, paving the way for his top lieutenant to take over the position.
But twice at a Tiger Bay Forum debate in Tampa on Friday, Glorioso referred to a little-noted miscue this past July as an example of how the Hillsborough office is not running as smoothly as Latimer advertises is the case.
"I'll have a quality control issue, so that what happened in the primary election, when a ballot was sent out that left a complete race off it for a House district, I would put a quality control issue in, to make sure that doesn't happen," Glorioso said. "That was only found because a candidate looked at his absentee ballot and his name wasn't even on it, and he was running for election. You didn't hear about that in the paper in a headline."
Actually, the Tampa Bay Times' Caitlin Johnson did write a story, referring to absentee ballots mailed out in New Tampa missing the Florida House District 63 Democratic race between Mark Danish and Z.J. Hafeez.
The problem was said to be a computer glitch.
This article appears in Sep 20-26, 2012.