Bucher opponent: Using Boca mosque for voting a bad idea
WEST PALM BEACH — Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher’s opponent agrees with Bucher’s pulling a Boca Raton mosque as a voting site. But not for the same reasons.
T h i s m o n t h , B u c h e r reversed her dec i sion to place Precinct 4170 at the Islamic Center of Boca Raton and instead moved it to the Boca Raton’s Spanish River Library. The action sparked debate over security vs. discrimination.
“I openly criticized her dec i s i o n t o put i t i n t he Islamic Center. I applauded her decision to remove it,” Republican Christine Spain told The Palm Beach Post editorial board Tuesday. “I never would have placed it Get the candidates’ background and views in their own words in The Post’s exclusive Know Your Candidates online guide, there.”
Spain, a former Broward County GOP chairwoman, said Tuesday this isn’t about religion. She said the Islamic Center of Boca Raton “has significant links to terrorist activit y” and cited “its anti-Semitism and its advoc a c y of Shar i a l aw.” She called Bucher’s original selection of the site “a totally irresponsible decision.”
Mosque officials dispute Spain’s characterization and local national Jewish groups have described moving the polling place as discriminatory.
Spain said she didn’t know if a voter actually would be in danger voting there but that many “would not be comfortable.”
Bucher, a Democrat who is up for re-election to the nonpartisan post in the Aug. 30 election, has said that as many as 50 callers advised her to move the site, with some warning they’d try to block voting or even would call in a bomb threat to clear the building.
Bucher, also at an Edito- rial Board interview Tuesday, said she’s convinced the mosque is a house of worship and she’s had good relationships with the county’s Muslim community — “a very peaceful group of people” — for two decades.
“I saw it as a community building,” she said. But she had to move the site “when we had a heightened threat t h a t t h e y were go i n g t o impede voters. I was very disappointed in our community and saw we have a lot of work to do.”
B a s s e m A l h a l a b i , t h e mosque’s president , has told The Post he was blindsided by Bucher’s action and has said she was too quick to, in his words, cave in to “bigots.”