Leave the mail-in ballot cycle alone
“
Vote by mail was a success and it was operated successfully.”
As Sen. Dennis Baxley of Ocala explained during a Tuesday Senate hearing, Florida’s experience with mail voting helped the Sunshine State — once the nation’s poster child for voting issues — set the example on how to run elections during a pandemic.
If Florida’s mail voting system is running so well, why are Baxley and fellow Republicans trying to make it more cumbersome for voters?
Baxley is the sponsor of Senate Bill 90, which would invalidate current requests for mail ballots ahead of the 2022 elections. Right now, the law allows such requests to remain current for two general election cycles. The bill would limit vote-by-mail applications to one cycle, meaning requests made in 2020 would no longer be valid in next year’s gubernatorial election. The Senate Committee on Ethics and Elections approved the bill along party lines Tuesday.
Republicans’ rationale here seems to be, “If ain’t broke, that’s the problem.” In 2020, 4.8 million Floridians voted by mail, the majority of whom were Democrats. Of course, that wasn’t enough to stop Donald Trump from increasing his winning margin in the state and Democrats from losing seats in Miami-Dade County. But Democrats’ mail voting strategy might be enough to worry the GOP in 2022, when Gov. Ron DeSantis, who won election in 2018 by a mere 32,000 votes, is running again.
If that’s the reasoning behind SB 90, we advise Republicans to rely on Democrats’ internal turmoil and propensity for self-sabotaging instead of adding an obstacle to voter access.
Despite Florida’s unprecedented number of mail ballots and Trump’s attempts to vilify vote-bymail as prone to widespread election fraud, there’s no evidence that happened in Florida.
If you don’t trust us, ask the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Laurel Lee, a Republican appointee. She told the Senate ethic committee Tuesday that “I’m not personally aware of” election fraud in 2020. She added that if law enforcement received complaints, she wasn’t informed.
Baxley said he’s concerned about a voter moving after requesting a ballot, but existing law already prevents the post office from delivering a ballot to an address where someone no longer lives. Requests are canceled when any first-class mail sent by the county supervisor of elections is
returned as undeliverable.
According to Baxley’s predictions, vote-by-mail has worked in Florida but “over time, you’re going to have a hard time protecting” elections. That’s nonsensical given that current law has been in place with no major issues since 2007. That year, the Legislature expanded the amount of time over which a ballot request is valid to mirror what’s allowed for certain military and overseas voters.
Senate Bill 90 isn’t entirely awful. It would allow counties more time to process mail ballots: 35 to 40 days before an election instead of 22 days. That provision would put into law an executive order DeSantis signed in 2020 that allowed Florida to deliver presidential election results ahead of many states that had to wait until Election Day to start the process.
But the rest of this legislation belongs in the paper shredder. While not solving any real problems, it would force supervisors of elections to scramble to comply and notify voters, costing counties hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Above all, this smacks of a partisan attempt to confuse voters and catch them off guard in next year’s election.
In an interview about his latest book and several other pressing issues, Bill Gates sounded especially concerned when I asked him about the slow pace of COVID-19 vaccination in Latin America and other parts of the developing world.
The Microsoft founder and mega-philanthropist, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated more than $1 billion to help combat the coronavirus pandemic especially in developing countries, told me that in the best case scenario the vaccines will control the virus in Latin America six months after the United States.
But he cautioned that the delay could be much longer, perhaps of up to 12 months.
If things go well with the AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax vaccines, “the inequity will be about a six-month” delay. “If things don’t go well with those vaccines, it could be nine to twelve months,” he said.
Gates lamented that, under the Trump administration, the United States failed to support the World Health Organization’s COVAX global vaccination program to help developing countries get 2 billion COVID-19 vaccines by the end of this year.
While president, Donald Trump withdrew from the WHO, and did not contribute funds for the COVAX program.
His measures were strongly criticized by the scientific community, because you can’t defeat a pandemic if the rest of the world gets infected.
In addition, “the previous administration said that every American should have a vaccine before a single vaccine gets out of the country, which, you know, I don’t agree with,” Gates told me.
Fortunately, the Biden administration’s $900 billion COVID relief package includes $4 billion for the COVAX initiative, and “we encourage the Congress to finally show up to help the global effort,” Gates said.
He added that “the Biden administration is very engaged in saying no, it’s not just America.”
When I asked Gates who he thinks is behind the crazy conspiracy theories claiming that he is planting chips in COVID-19 vaccines to control people’s minds, he conceded that he is “surprised about the volume” of these false claims circulating about him and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci.
“It’s kind of ironic that when you are trying, when you are giving money away and saving lives, the conspiracy theory says that you are trying to make money, or that you are trying to actually reduce the population,” he said.
Perhaps it’s because “during a tough pandemic, people will reach oversimplistic explanations and trying to say, ‘OK, there’s some evil force here,’ ” he added. “And it’s, of course, fanned by the ability to communicate digitally. I’m hopeful that as people see the vaccine getting out and that the death rates are coming down, the truth is accepted broadly.”
The interview with Gates centered mostly on his new book, “How to avoid a climate disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need.” I will share with you what he told me about this in my next column.
But going back to the delays in bringing COVID-19 vaccines to Latin America and other regions, Gates should be applauded for drawing world attention on this.
Unless rich countries step up efforts to get vaccines to countries such as Brazil and Mexico — which alongside the United States have the world’s highest numbers of coronavirus deaths — we won’t defeat the pandemic.
Just after my interview with Gates, new statistics about the vaccine rollout inequities underscored the severity of the problem.
While Israel had administered 76 doses of COVID-19 vaccines per 100 people by Feb. 16, and the United States 16, the vaccination rate in Latin America — with the exception of Chile — is dismal.
By that date, Brazil had given out only 2.5 vaccines per 100 people, Argentina 1.4, Mexico 0.6, and Peru 0.2 per 100 people, according to Oxford University’s Ourwoldindata.org website.
Gates is right. Unless we move fast to provide funds for the COVAX global vaccination effort, the world will be much more unsafe for everybody, including for Americans.