South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Officials plan for voting changes
Despite Trump claims, mail ballots not riddled with fraud, corruption
President Donald Trump has repeatedly assailed voting by mail, asserting that it is rife with fraud and is “corrupt.” It’s not, at least not in Florida.
Mail voting has significant problems. Ballots cast by mail have a larger chance of not getting counted than votes cast in person. And schemers have tried to game the system.
But there is no evidence of systematic fraud from voting by mail in Florida, according to a range of government officials, political analysts and partisan campaign operatives. Low-level ballot fraud has occasionally popped up in local elections, but nowhere near the scale suggested by the president.
“Absolutely not,” said Sean Foreman, a political scientist at Barry University. “Corruption is not the problem. Voter fraud is not the problem.”
Daniel Smith, a University of Florida political scientist, said Trump’s assertion that there’s widespread mail voting fraud is “hogwash.” Smith is one of the nation’s leading experts on voting and election administration.
“The evidence is this: When it comes to voter fraud, in Florida or generally, it’s very rare,” he said.
And Trevor Potter, president of
the national Campaign Legal Center and former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said the president’s claims of millions of fraudulent mail votes are “completely unsubstantiated” and “contrary to the evidence.”
CORONAVIRUS INCREASE: Although the president is opposed, people want more mail-in voting. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted Monday and Tuesday found 72% of U.S. adults supported requiring mail-in ballots to protect voters if coronavirus is still present later this year.
County supervisors of elections in Florida are preparing for a huge increase in demand for mail ballots in the August primary and non-partisan elections and in the November presidential election.
“We expect at least a 50% increase in vote by mail – if not more,” said Tammy Jones, the supervisor of elections in Levy County and president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections. “We definitely recommend everybody in a highrisk category vote by mail, because we don’t know what the future is going to look like.”
Wendy Sartory Link, the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections, planned months ago to order paper and envelopes for 300,000 mail ballots for August and November elections. She’s already upped that order to 1 million in the county that has 978,000 registered voters.
TRUMP COMPLAINTS: Trump railed against mail voting this week during televised appearances from the White House and on Twitter, calling it “a very dangerous thing for this country,” “fraudulent in many cases,” “horrible,” “corrupt,” and “a terrible thing.”
He claimed unidentified people or groups “grab thousands of mailin ballots and they dump it.” Although the president said “there’s a lot of evidence,” he didn’t offer any when pressed by reporters.
Trump’s concerns were echoed by long-time South Florida supporters: George Moraitis, chairman of the Broward Republican Party, and Michael Barnett, chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party.
“There could be a problem,” Moraitis said. A former member of the state House of Representatives, Moraitis said he isn’t aware of local instances of mail ballot fraud.
Barnett said no examples came to mind, adding he wasn’t at home and so couldn’t consult his computer. “There have been concerns about it for years and years and years,” he said. “I don’t think the president’s off base.”
Jones, who has worked in her county’s elections office for 26 years, said she doesn’t see evidence of mail ballot fraud in the state. “Florida has a very good system in place.”
FLORIDA EXPERIENCE: As part of the reforms that followed the 2000 George W. Bush vs. Al Gore election debacle, Florida opened up mail voting to anyone who chooses to use it. Another 27 states have rules similar to Florida, allowing anyone to vote by mail.
Other states are far more restrictive and some conduct elections entirely by mail.
Besides arguing that there’s fraud with mail voting, Trump asserted it hurts Republicans politically. But since voting by mail expanded in Florida, Republicans haven’t found themselves at a disadvantage:
Republicans have continued their political dominance of the state, winning virtually every statewide election and maintaining control of the state’s congressional delegation and the state Legislature.
It’s proven especially popular among Republican voters in Florida – including Trump, who voted by mail last month in Florida’s presidential primary. So did his wife, First Lady Melania Trump.
Trump won Florida’s 29 electoral votes in 2016, beating Hillary Clinton by 1.2 percentage points in an election in which 2.7 million votes – three out of every 10 votes in the election – was a vote-bymail ballot. More Republicans voted by mail in 2016 than Democrats.
SCATTERED PROBLEMS: Though not nearly the scope described by the president, Florida has had fraud connected with the use of mail-in ballots.
The state changed the law starting with 2014 elections to prohibit campaigns from paying people to collect ballots and return them to county elections offices. The prohibition was aimed largely at Miami-Dade County’s boleteros, a Spanish term for people who collect absentee ballots. They had been linked to fraudulent ballots.
In Palm Beach County, the State Attorney’s Office investigated allegations of mail-in voter fraud in the 2016 primary. Investigators determined that 21 mail-in ballot request forms had been forged, but prosecutors did not pursue charges, noting in a June 2017 memo “there was not enough evidence to name a suspect.”
Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, said via Twitter direct message that “in our experiences, instances of voter fraud by mail are rare.” Broward State Attorney Mike Satz declined to comment, a spokeswoman said.
OPPOSITE PROBLEM: The biggest problem experts with mail voting, according to experts, is the opposite of voter fraud. People who chose mail voting have a bigger chance that their votes won’t count than people who vote in person at regional early voting sites or at neighborhood polling places on election day.
Ballots sometimes aren’ t counted because people forget to sign the envelope, which is used to verify a voter’s identity, and signatures sometimes don’t match what’s on file.
Sometimes that’s because peoples’ signatures change over time, Jones said. Smith’s research revealed that young people, firsttime voters and minority voters have a higher chance of their ballots not counting than older and white voters, according to Smith’s research.
Except for overseas and military ballots, mail votes must all be in the county supervisor of elections office by 7 p.m. on election day; postmarks don’t count. Late ballots aren’t tallied.
ELECTION CHANGES: More in mail voting isn’t the only coming election change.
Jones and Link said elections officials are planning for much more early voting at regional voting sites and a much different election day experience. The supervisors’ association wrote to Gov. Ron DeSantis this week asking him to consider emergency procedures to reflect the new reality.
Link said she’s already been notified that many locations used for neighborhood voting on election days don’t want to participate this year.
Both supervisors said a large part of the election day workforce of poll workers, many of whom are retirees, won’t want to do it because of coronavirus concerns.
Link said she wouldn’t ask her own mother to work at the polls in a time of coronavirus.
But Barnett said it’s premature to implement changes. “I think by the time October rolls around this will be all behind us, months and months behind us.”