NAACP, elections supervisor pushing DeSantis to fill congressional seat sooner
The NAACP is joining with Broward Elections Supervisor Joe Scott in demanding that Gov. Ron DeSantis abandon his plan to leave the late U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings’ seat vacant for more than nine months before a special election.
The civil rights organization and state Sen. Shevrin Jones said Friday they support Scott’s proposal for a special primary election on Aug. 31 and a special general election on Nov. 2 to fill the vacancy in the 20th Congressional District.
DeSantis said this week the primary would be Nov. 2 with a general election Jan. 11, and on Thursday he signed an executive order setting those dates. Under the governor’s schedule — which state law gives him the authority to set — the seat would be vacant for more than nine months. That’s far longer than other recent Florida congressional vacancies.
Scott said DeSantis’ dates “will not work for this community for a number of reasons.” Among them: a Jan. 11 special election would require early voting to start on New Year’s Day.
Marsha Ellison, president of the NAACP Fort Lauderdale/Broward branch and civic engagement chairwoman of the Florida state NAACP, called on DeSantis “to be the governor of all the people, even the people of the 20th Congressional District.”
The governor’s decision to “put the election off is not baffling, but certainly infuriating,” Ellison said at a news conference hosted by Scott at the Broward Supervisor of Elections Office. “We certainly want the governor to be the governor of all the people, even those that look like me.”
DeSantis was not persuaded. “At this time there are no plans to change the dates,” Taryn Fenske, the governor’s communications director, said by email.
Ellison said she’s reached out to the NAACP legal office to see if there is a way to compel an earlier election to fill the vacancy, but doesn’t know yet if that’s possible.
Also on Friday, Elvin Dowling, one of the 10 Democratic candidates seeking to fill the vacancy left by Hastings’ April 6 death said he was amending a federal lawsuit he filed April 30 seeking to compel DeSantis to set election dates, which the governor did on Thursday.
Dowling said he’d now seek a ruling that the Nov. 2 primary and
Broward Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott says the special election dates Gov. Ron DeSantis set to fill the vacancy created by the death of U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings “will not work for this community for a number of reasons.”
Jan. 11 general election are “unreasonable and politically motivated,” and have the effect of disenfranchising the Broward and Palm Beach county voters who live in the 20th District.
Democrats see the Republican governor — who is building his brand for a 2024 campaign for his party’s presidential nomination — as having no incentive to do anything that anyone in his party’s base could see as assisting Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“Let’s put Nancy Pelosi, let’s put all that to the side right now,” Jones said at the news conference. “Nine months without representation
is almost a lifetime when you talk about what this community needs.”
There was some Democratic politics at play on Friday. Reporters were notified about the event by Ron Be Gone, an anti-DeSantis super PAC.
And Dowling, who wasn’t part of the Scott-Jones-Ellison event, hopes to use the question of dates to show he’s advocating for district residents. By holding such late elections, Dowling said in a statement, DeSantis “is trampling upon the rights of ordinary, everyday South Floridians, to equal representation in Congress. I intend to fight for those rights until hell freezes over, and then I will fight on the ice.”
Voter registration in the
20th District, which takes in most of the African American and Caribbean American neighborhoods in Broward and Palm Beach counties, is 62% Democratic, 24% no party affiliation/independent, and 13% Republican. President Joe Biden won 79.8% of the 2020 presidential vote in the district. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton received 79.8%.
The district is so Democratic that the winner of that party’s primary is virtually guaranteed to become the next member of Congress — after the special general election.