That tweet about voting by mail and Trump’s Florida lies
Even by the outrageously untruthful standards of President Trump, this tweet should have stopped every Florida voter cold.
As he railed against voting by mail in Nevada this week, the tweeter-in-chief warned us all about a “corrupt disaster” and said this in the context of elections planning: “Florida has built a great infrastructure over years, with two great Republican governors.”
Eager for Florida’s 29 electoral votes, he perpetuated the myth at a press conference. ”Florida’s a very well-run state,” Trump said. “Low taxes, low everything. They’ve done a great job.”
Trump was referring, of course, to Gov. Ron DeSantis and his predecessor, Rick Scott, now Florida’s junior U.S. senator — and nothing could be further from the truth. While Florida for the most part has strong voting systems in place, it’s in spite of these two. The credit goes to the county supervisors who actually run elections, and advocacy groups that mobilized public opinion and repeatedly went to court when needed.
That’s especially true in the case of Scott, who was openly hostile to the most minor voting reforms, and has been labeled by voting rights groups as a “repeat offender” at suppressing the vote.
In eight years as governor, Scott did as much for voting rights in Florida as he did for unemployment assistance. Maybe less.
He set the tone from the outset in 2011 when he insisted that convicted felons wait five years after leaving prison before they could even apply for a restoration of the right to vote and other rights. It was this repressive Jim Crow-type policy that Amendment 4 sought to undo, and the court fights continue.
Great infrastructure? Scott tried to purge the voter rolls of non-citizens, but counties refused to trust the data, and some people were wrongly targeted. He signed House Bill 1355, the notoriously partisan power grab that reduced early voting days and abolished “souls to the polls” on the Sunday before the election in 2012 in a naked ploy to make it harder for Barack Obama to win re-election. Shamed into action, the Legislature restored those days the very next year.
The list goes on. Scott’s administration tried to stop Pinellas County from using remote drop-boxes to make voting by mail easier, but Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark refused to cave in to pressure. The boxes stayed, and now, because of this pandemic, they will be used statewide to help voters deliver their ballots to secure places, with less person-to-person contact.
During Hurricane Matthew in 2014, Scott refused to extend the voter registration deadline by one measly week to accommodate people displaced by the powerful storm. U.S. District Judge Mark Walker ordered the extension.
It took intervention by the same judge to compel Florida to allow early voting on college and university campuses, and the Legislature had to force him to catch up with most other states and allow people to register to vote or update their voting addresses online.
Scott’s track record helps explain why voters in Broward were so skeptical about his choice of an ally, Pete Antonacci, as the county’s supervisor of elections. It’s why there’s such close attention to Broward’s upcoming primary, as there should be.
As for DeSantis, he hasn’t been an advocate of expanding voting rights either, and he simply hasn’t been in office long enough to inflict the kind of damage that Scott did.
But there have been voting-related issues with the current governor, too.
He pursues a costly and divisive legal battle to prevent felons from being able to vote. He waited two-and-a-half months, then rejected a reasonable request from election supervisors to extend early voting to 22 days and to keep early voting sites open through Election Day. He did issue an order that expanded the period of time for processing vote-by-mail ballots.
DeSantis waited far too long for Florida to ask the federal government for the state’s share of CARES Act money to harden election infrastructure. Some counties need the money desperately, and it still hasn’t arrived, with a statewide primary election now 10 days away.
Trump, who votes in Palm Beach County, has spoken a lot about voting “absentee” in his adopted state of Florida, but an online check as of Friday showed he has not yet requested a vote-by-mail ballot for the Aug. 18 primary.
He blew a golden public relations opportunity by not requesting a mail ballot, to demonstrate to everyone how reliable it is. Voting by mail is not perfect, but in a pandemic, it’s the best option available for many voters. There also are stronger safeguards and heightened scrutiny of voting by mail.
The nation’s serial fabricator did get one thing right, however. In the last line of that tweet Wednesday morning, Trump said: “Florida, send in your Ballots!”