It’s now 2013, and will be for the better part of the coming year. If there is, in fact, a better part. But the New Year has already brought hope to tens of thousands of Floridians with Gov. Rick Scott’s announcement that lines outside most of the state’s polling places have shortened to the point it is now likely they might, if the current pace holds, actually get to vote in the most recent presidential election sometime before Barack Obama’s upcoming second term expires.

It was a year that exceeded all expectations. In 2012, Florida again proved itself incapable of organizing a one-car funeral, let alone muster the competence required to pull off an election that seemed destined to determine the future course of the republic. The first hint of the trouble ahead appeared early in the year when Scott abruptly and inexplicably ordered the state’s 67 supervisors of elections to arbitrarily purge some 182,000 randomly selected citizens from their rolls.