Nonpartisan board needed to steer elections
Amidst an exquisitely close recount of votes for the U.S. Senate, one governor had this to say: “Let’s get this right. All legally cast votes must be counted.”
That was Arizona’s Doug Ducey, a Republican, who wasn’t a candidate.
But you knew, of course, that it couldn’t have been Florida’s governor, Rick Scott. He’s been pitching tantrums of Trumpian proportions in his attacks on Brenda Snipes, Broward County’s supervisor of elections, and on the entire recount process. Without a whiff of proof, he’s accusing Sen. Bill Nelson of fraud — an outright slander that even Scott’s own agencies refuse to support. Through the secretary of state Scott appointed, he’s fighting any extension of the impossibly short deadline to complete the most extensive recount in Florida history—a recount mandated by state law.
Scott’s conduct is beyond outrageous. And yet he’s the one with the thin lead and favored to keep it. What makes him so afraid of an orderly recount?
No less irresponsible is the so-called people’s lawyer, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who apparently yearns to replace former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in Donald Trump’s Cabinet. She should be defending the recount, not carrying Scott’s bucket of bile. Presidential tweets are inflaming the situation and Sen. Marco Rubio, who long since cashed in his honor to become a Trump toady, is piling on. The commander in chief and Rubio even claim Florida should ignore the law giving members of the armed forces and other overseas Americans extra time to get their absentee ballots in and counted.
All this has ominous implications for the 2020 election and beyond. Americans are being coached to disrespect the democratic process.
But what’s particularly intolerable in Florida’s case is that Scott, unlike the demagogue in the White House, actually controls the election process. He appoints the secretary of state, and normally would sit on the canvassing board that will certify whether he or incumbent Democrat Nelson has won the U.S. Senate race. To his credit, he said he’ll step aside from that role, but that would leave the three Republican Cabinet members in charge. One is Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis, who was appointed by Scott and would have to certify his own election. Another is Bondi, who has already shown such unseemly bias that she should disqualify herself, too.
Just as no one is allowed to sit as a judge on his or her own case, no politician with any stake in the outcome should have anything to do, directly or indirectly, with overseeing the voting rolls and conducting an election. If that is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
Florida desperately needs to establish an independent, nonpartisan board to oversee elections. That represents another glaring oversight by a deplorably politicized Constitution Revision Commission. .
No matter who becomes governor, senator and agriculture commissioner, the people’s faith in the process and the outcomes of these close elections is jeopardized. It reprises the debacle in 2000, when Gov. Jeb Bush stepped aside from the canvassing board but the then-elected secretary of state was a partisan hack who was one of George Bush’s state campaign co-chairs.
Nine other states offer examples of independent, nonpartisan boards of elections for Florida to follow. They are Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, North Carolina, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin. When North Carolina elected a new governor by a thin margin two years ago, the defeated Republican incumbent squirmed like a hooked fish but the board gave the public confidence to accept the outcome. Now, though, that ex-governor is on the radio complaining that the election was stolen from him because students were allowed to vote. Disrespect for orderly elections is going viral—all the more reason for Florida to do what it can to stop it.
Only Florida and four other states have a chief election official appointed by the governor. Another 24 put elections under an elected secretary of state, as Florida used to. But that system doesn’t guarantee competent results, as Florida learned 18 years ago. The change to an appointed secretary, already in progress then, hasn’t worked so well either. An appointed secretary is only as good as the governor who makes the appointment. Ken Detzner’s record is riddled with bad decisions, including a voter purge botched with unreliable data, rulings that the University of Florida couldn’t use its student union as a voting site, and opposition to the registration by mail law that he tried to persuade Scott to veto. Despite an influx of new voters from hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, who are native born American citizens, it took a federal judge’s order to get Detzner to have sample ballots printed in Spanish.
“Here we go again,” wrote District Judge Mark Walker. “It is remarkable that it takes a coalition of voting rights organizations and individuals to sue in federal court to seek minimal compliance with the plain language of a venerable 53-year-old law.”
He has now seven more current election lawsuits before him.
Leon County’s retired supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho, ran a superb operation and is widely recognized nationally as an expert in the field. He offers what sounds like an ideal model for fair election administration. Create a board of two Republicans and two Democrats who would be appointed by the House Speaker and Senate president with the concurrence of the minority leaders. A fifth member would have to be either unaffiliated or a member of a minor party, and he or she would be appointed by a neutral authority such as the Florida Bar or the Supreme Court. The five members would appoint a professional administrator. To avoid questionable allegiances, everyone’s party registrations would have to be at least five years old.
Sancho floated the idea 20 years ago but it got no traction in Tallahassee. If the politicians are still disinterested, as is likely the case, it’s a ripe subject for another citizen initiative with the slogan “Fair Elections.” Who could oppose that? Well, yes, some people would, and we all know who they are. But this state and country belong to all of us, not just to them, and fair elections ought to be our birthright.