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Florida voters trust local elections, worry about state and national integrity, study finds

Voter confidence in Florida’s local elections remains high, but concerns about election integrity at the state and national levels persist, according to a study published last week by the LeRoy Collins Institute at Florida State University.

The study found that 95 percent of Florida voters are confident their ballots were counted correctly, with 75 percent expressing strong confidence. Confidence in county-level results is also robust, with 93 percent of voters reporting they are very or somewhat confident.

However, confidence wanes at higher levels of government. At the state level, 56 percent of voters expressed strong confidence in the election results, while another 36 percent were somewhat confident. This leaves 9 percent of voters expressing low confidence in state-level outcomes.

Nationally, just 31 percent of voters are very confident in the accuracy of election results, and 42 percent are not confident at all.

SCOTUS rejects review of Florida case challenging 6-person juries

The U.S. Supreme Court won’t take up the case of a Florida woman sentenced to eight years in prison by a jury of six people. Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented from the decision and chided the rest of the court for not considering the case.

“Florida does what the Constitution forbids because of us,” Gorsuch wrote. Most criminal trials require a 12-person jury. But in Florida and five other states (Arizona, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts and Utah), a six-person jury can be used. In Florida, all non-death penalty criminal trials use six-person juries.

In a brief opposing the motion to take up the case, Attorney General Ashley Moody noted there were more than 5,000 cases in Florida pending appeal over the issue of the size of the jury.

The case involves Natoya Cunningham, who was charged with aggravated battery and retaliation against a witness or informant and sentenced to 8 years in prison in 2022. Cunningham was accused of going to the home of a confidential informant after her cousin’s arrest for selling cocaine. She didn’t leave after being told to, and proceeded to stab the informant in the arm.

Florida faces hectic hurricane season. Can science say who will get hit in coming months?

The bottom line of every preseason hurricane forecast this spring has been sobering, even a little scary. Meteorologists and their computer models all agree that it’s going to be a super busy and perhaps record-breaking season — and that with so many expected storms, it’s very likely that somebody, somewhere is going to get smacked this year. But exactly who and where?

That’s been a question many scientists have long considered impossible to answer months ahead of any storm forming. But an increasing number of experts are starting to take a crack at it.

This year, for instance both AccuWeather and Colorado State University included landfall chances in their advance forecasts for hurricane season 2024, which officially starts on Monday and runs through November.

Their odds will only add to Florida’s seasonal hurricane anxiety: CSU, for instance, predicts a near-lock that the state will be impacted somewhere by a tropical system and a roughly one-in-three chance that South Florida will see a hurricane. Accuweather predicts four to six direct hits somewhere along the United States coastline this season.

New data shows Tampa Bay's true unemployment rate

America has lots of good jobs, but they're not evenly distributed.

Why it matters: The full spectrum of inequality within the U.S. is on display in an updated dataset released this month by the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP).

How it works: LISEP's proprietary True Rate of Unemployment measures the proportion of workers looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — and who can't find one.

• Nationwide, the True Unemployment rate was 24.2% as of April.

Zoom in: In 2023, Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater (22.5%) and Lakeland-Winter Haven (20.2%) had slightly lower rates than the national True Unemployment rate of 23%.

• North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton averaged 23.8%.
• Ocala (13%) and Palm Bay (14%) had some of the nation's lowest unemployment rates. Such low rates can indicate a community is disproportionately home to wealthier residents who don't need to work.