Stressed by voting changes, just the way GOP wants

TALLAHASSEE — The Florida Legislature deliberately made it harder for people to vote, even in ways few anticipated.

The full impact of Senate Bill 90, a partisan Republican rush job signed into law in May by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is still not clear. But disturbing patterns are emerging in Broward, the state’s largest Democratic county, which along with Palm Beach is now holding a special election for Congress under the new law.

Voting advocates and Democrats correctly warned that SB 90 was a calculated Republican strategy to discourage people from voting. Now we see rattled voters, caught unaware, getting official letters warning them to update their voting profiles or they can’t vote by mail. That’s just how Republicans wanted it after a smoothly run 2020 election in which Democrats voted by mail in record numbers.

Buried on page 32 of the 48-page elections bill is a new requirement that was largely overshadowed by more controversial provisions such as limiting the use of drop boxes, cutting by half the lifespan of standing mail ballot requests, and restricting contact with voters at the polls. All of those changes are the focus of a federal lawsuit by Common Cause, Disability Rights Florida and the Florida Conference of the NAACP.

The largely overlooked provision requires that anyone who votes by mail must provide one of three unique identifiers to get a ballot: a Florida driver’s license number, state ID number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. That information must be verified by the state. No identifier, no mail ballot.

In Broward alone, more than 73,000 voters fall into this category. Broward Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott last week sent letters and voter forms to all 73,016 of them, including thousands who are eligible to vote in the special election in the 20th Congressional District.

“Our phones have been ringing off the hook,” Scott said. “People are a little agitated at being asked for this additional information.”

Scott went a step further and produced a brief video message in which he calmly explains the change and reassures voters that their personal information is very safe.

“Please don’t stress,” he says on the video. “Together, we can make this happen.”

During the intense debate over SB 90, the new requirements for mail ballots didn’t draw much attention.

There was virtually no evidence of fraud in voting by mail, but lawmakers in both parties were mindful of an alarming case in which a Naples man hacked the state voter database to change DeSantis’ voting address to Palm Beach County. The governor still voted, the 20-year-old hacker was arrested and did not gain access to high-security portals where driver’s license and Social Security information is kept.

But what some scheming legislators knew was this: Many Florida voters registered before the state began to require those identifiers in 2004, and many are seniors who have voted for decades. Without the identifiers on record, they can still vote, but must vote in person either on Election Day or early, which starts Saturday, Oct. 23.

If they want to keep voting by mail, with the coronavirus still raging, they have to update their records online or fill out new voter registration forms. Broward’s unsettling experience is a warning to all other counties, and to candidates: If this isn’t fixed, it will mean fewer vote-by-mail ballots in 2022, when the stakes will be much higher. Many county election supervisors’ websites, such as Bill Cowles’ in Orange, provide handy SB 90 fact sheets to guide voters.

To further complicate matters, Scott said, a surprising number of people in Broward don’t drive and may not possess a state-issued ID, so their only way of getting a mail ballot is to provide their last four Social Security digits, which some older voters are wary of sharing.

In the congressional election, the last day to request a vote by mail ballot be mailed to a voter’s home is Saturday, Oct. 23. Starting next week, requests must be made in person.

If legislators weren’t in such a hurry to enact slapdash and constitutionally suspect changes, they might have researched the question of how much disruption this change would have caused. They could have paid for a public education effort. They could have phased in the change and given voters time to adjust, without chaos and confusion.

“It’s going to prevent people from voting by mail,” Scott predicted.

Which, of course, was just the point: to make it harder to legally cast your vote.