Boca mosque, removed as polling site, pushes to be reinstated

The presidential election has passed, but a controversy over whether a Boca Raton mosque should be used for voting is far from settled.

Bassem Alhalabi, president of the Islamic Center of Boca Raton, said he isn’t abandoning efforts to have his mosque added to Palm Beach County’s list of polling locations.

“We need to close the issue,” he said Thursday. “This is a big fiasco.”

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher initially planned to use the mosque for voting, but she removed it from the list of polling sites before the Nov. 8 election.

Bucher couldn’t be reached for comment despite a message left at her office Thursday. In a previous statement to reporters, Bucher said she moved voting to a nearby public library because of threats that had been made to disrupt voting at the mosque. She said one person even called in a bomb threat.

Voters cast ballots in Christian churches and Jewish temples, but no mosque was on the list of polling sites for the presidential election.

Alhalabi said he thinks that is discriminatory, but he is hopeful the mosque could be included as a site in the next election. He’s planning to meet with officials to discuss reinstating the mosque as a polling site.

The mosque also has received support in the community.

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Boca Raton withdrew its church as a voting site this week in protest of Bucher’s decision to stop voting at the mosque.

The Rev. Harris Riordan, the church’s minster, said she thinks if religious institutions are used for voting all faiths should be represented.

“We felt religious discrimination against once group was not something we were willing to participate in,” Riordan said.