Election experts versus voting fraud crackpots
When Gov. Ron DeSantis and lawmakers were making it harder for people to vote by mail, they didn’t seek the opinions of the professionals who actually count those votes. That would be Florida’s 67 county election supervisors who refuse to play politics.
But next week in Tampa, the governor’s people won’t have a choice. They’ll have to listen.
The state’s chief elections official, Secretary of State Laurel Lee, and her top elections expert will field questions from supervisors at a statewide conference where the overriding topic of conversation will be Senate Bill 90, the new law that forces voters to request mail ballots more often, and restricts the use of mail ballot drop boxes. These politically motivated changes and others are the focus of three federal lawsuits filed by voter advocacy groups who claim the law illegally targets Black and brown voters and people with disabilities.
Before last November, a gathering of elections geeks normally would not attract much attention. But America is awash in scary conspiracy theories that perpetuate falsehoods about the 2020 election, including the Big Lie that Trump really won but victory was stolen.Now the Trumpers are on social media, trying to organize protests at the elections conference in Tampa next week. That’s because the event will be attended, as it always is, by voting vendors promoting their equipment. That includes Dominion Voting Systems, which has been falsely accused by Trump and others of flipping votes to Joe Biden in other states and has sued Fox News for defamation, seeking billions of dollars in damages. You’ll find the Dominion display table inside the Marriott Tampa Water Street alongside those of its competitors.
There’s no proof of wrongdoing by Dominion, but the crackpot conspiracies continue.
A website, loomered.com, featuring the former Palm Beach County congressional candidate Laura Loomer, calls the supervisors’ group “deceptive” and sees something suspicious in its name change from Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections (FSASE) to FSE, short for Florida Supervisors of Elections. But according to the group’s incoming president, Supervisor Wesley Wilcox of Marion County, the reason behind the change is not very salacious. He said F-S-A-S-E was too hard to say.
“I’m like, ‘Really?’ ” Wilcox said. “We were looking for something short and succinct. That was the pure impetus of our change.”
On the Facebook page of a group called Defend Florida, Kathleen Holbrook urges protesters to show up Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. “No Dominion signs,” she writes. “They would sue their mother!!!” And this: “We need to change our voting software prior to our election in 2022!! Our elections aren’t for sale!”
The elections group has alerted Tampa police and the Hillsborough County Sheriff ’s Office, an official with the group said.
Eighteen counties in Florida use Dominion’s voting software to tabulate results, and Trump won 16 of them last fall on his way to a Florida victory. Pretty nefarious, huh? (The other two are the deep blue counties of Alachua and Leon, home to two of the state’s biggest universities, UF and FSU). The company’s equipment in Florida was most recently certified in October by the administration of — guess who? — DeSantis, an avowed Trump supporter.
Some conspiracy.
This conference will be the first for Joe Scott, the Broward supervisor of elections who calls SB 90 “an obvious effort to suppress the vote in places like Broward County,” with its high numbers of voters who are minorities and Democrats.
As a first-time candidate last fall, Scott saw first-hand the confusion at the polls as people dropped off mail ballots. Under SB 90, drop boxes must be staffed at all times and most of the boxes must shut down the Sunday before Election Day. That’s after early voting ends, but it’s a time when many procrastinators remember to return their ballots.
Under SB 90, those last-minute mail voters would have to drop their ballots at only two locations, the main elections office in downtown Fort Lauderdale or a voting equipment center in Lauderhill — in a county with 1.3 million voters.
But Scott thinks he has come up with a workaround that will help voters, though it may antagonize Republicans in Tallahassee. “I’m expecting pushback on it,” Scott said. “But I believe I’m right.”
Here’s his plan: By August, he’ll designate six more Broward sites as branch offices: county libraries in Miramar, Pembroke Pines, Tamarac and Coral Springs and community centers in Hallandale Beach and Pompano Beach. Under existing law, to qualify as a branch, an elections office must be in use for one year before an election.
Scott’s plan to expand branch offices is a story definitely worth telling his fellow supervisors in Tampa next week. But first he’ll have to navigate past the conspiracy theorists on the sidewalk outside the hotel.