Is this ... thing partly to blame for the voting controversies in Florida? (Getty Images)

If you've cracked open anything electronic this week, then you've probably heard about the long wait times and official pratfalls afflicting those trying to cast a ballot in the state of Florida.

The situation seems especially bad in the Miami area, which, of course, is the most highly populated region of the state. What's to blame? It's probably any number of factors, some avoidable, some not. But ThinkProgress is laying a healthy share at the feet of the Miami Marlins. Travis Waldron writes: 

At the same time that voting opportunities are reduced because of budget concerns, cities are wasting huge amounts of public money to subsidize expensive and wasteful projects. In Miami, for instance, the city force-fed a new baseball stadium for the Miami Marlins to residents. To finance the stadium, Miami-Dade County sold $377 million in public bonds, and the city of Miami sold an additional $102 million. If other cities are any indication, financing the debt on those bonds will eventually force the city to cut back on other services it provides to its residents.

Compared to the cost of its shiny new stadium that residents didn’t want, adding to the existing electoral infrastructure would cost almost nothing. The cost of maintaining the average polling station in Citrus County, Florida, for example, is just $5,000, according to the county’s election supervisor.

That means the cost of opening and maintaining new voting stations in cities like Miami would run in the thousands of dollars, less than a single day of costs for a facility like Marlins Park (the daily cost of financing the bonds is roughly $32,800).

It's true that the Marlins and local leaders performed a pretty shady end run around the will of the people in order to get the ballpark financed. It's also true that publicly funded sports facilities are awful investments for municipalities. It's a practice that should cease immediately. On the other hand, you could do line-item review of the county budget and find any number of expenditures that could be better deployed toward improving that "electoral infrastructure." So it's kind of convenient to use what's going on in Florida as a cudgel against the Marlins.

On the, um, third hand, anything that strikes a blow against using tax dollars to build ballparks is a good thing.  

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