Elections supervisor apologizes for letters
Some voters reported notices that could change voting status
Broward’s supervisor of elections says he didn’t mean to scare 146,000 people who received “final notices” from his office threatening to designate them as an “inactive voter.”
After receiving complaints from several voters who questioned why they were receiving the notices — they vote regularly and have not changed their address in years — Supervisor Pete Antonacci said Wednesday he’s going to apologize to all who got the mailer.
“We had voters receive this notice from us that is in fact a little bit scary,” Antonacci said. “It’s our plan to send them another postcard, first class, that certainly expresses my apologies and regrets for aggravating them.”
Antonacci said no one’s voting status will change as a result of the final notice mailer. The apology will remind voters to update their address if it has changed.
Antonacci said he will have elections workers personally look at the voter files before the status of any voter is switched.
Shortly after Antonacci spoke with the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Broward County’s Congressional delegation announced it was sending a letter to Antonacci asking him to find and fix the causes of the errors and assure affected voters that their voting status is not in jeopardy.
The letter from the four Democrats representing Broward in the U.S. House of Representatives said the situation has caused “confu
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sion” and risks “the full and equal participation” of county voters in future elections.
“Without clarification, voters who received the erroneous notifications from your office will be under the assumption that their voter registration is at risk,” said the letter, signed by Reps. Ted Deutch, Alcee Hastings, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Frederica Wilson.
“We’re doing all that,” said Antonacci, who had yet to receive the delegation’s letter.
The delegation was responding to an earlier Sun Sentinel report that a number of voters who received the final notice saw no reason for their address to be questioned.
Two contacted by the Sun Sentinel were Democrats questioning if it might have been an attempt at voter suppression, given that Antonacci was appointed by former Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, to replace Brenda Snipes, a Democrat who resigned following vote-counting problems in last year’s November elections.
Ken Evans, of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, and Ray Stepnowski, of Deerfield Beach, have lived in their homes for more than 20 years and have voted in every election for more than a decade, but each got the notices from the elections office questioning their addresses.
The elections office said the errors had to do with the office’s bulk-mailing process and wasn’t political. The company it uses, Commercial Printers in Fort
Lauderdale, has been handling its mailings for years and also prints the county’s ballots, officials said.
Initially, the elections office sent out a non-forwardable information mailer in September through bulk mail to the county’s 1.2 million voters, with 146,000 coming back as undeliverable, officials said. It’s those voters who then got the final notice mailer.
The elections office said a return rate of between 10% and 15% is typical, and the county’s return number, though large, comes to about 12% of the total mailing. “That 12% represents a real fluid society. People move around a lot,” Antonacci said.
Antonacci said he’s more concerned that the followup notice was not the mail that should have been sent out. Instead of a final notice, those voters should have received a much less threatening “address request for information” postcard, he said. Only if no response to that request is received should a final notice be sent out, he said.
However, even if a voter is designated inactive, they are still eligible to vote and it’s easy to change their status back to active, Antonacci said. They can either contact the elections office, send back an address confirmation, vote in an upcoming election — either by mail, at an early voting site or at their regular polling precinct — or request a mail-in ballot.
It’s only if a voter is designated inactive and doesn’t vote through the next two upcoming general elections that they become ineligible to vote and must provide additional information to restore their eligibility.