South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Check a box, get a mail ballot, send Trump a primary message
Check your mail. Look for a notice from the elections supervisor urging you to request a mail-in ballot for the August primary election. Check the box and mail it back. Do it to protect your health and the public health — and ensure a healthy turnout.
Many voters are uneasy about going to the polls because of the coronavirus. They should be. After the March presidential primary, two Broward County poll workers tested positive for the virus, including one who worked all nine days at an early voting site in Weston.
Elections supervisors are doing their best to make the polls safe, but the safest bet is a mail-in ballot. Still, you have to request one. That’s why the supervisors in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties began an outreach campaign this week to encourage you to do so.
About 200,000 of Broward’s 1.2 million registered voters have standing requests for mail-in ballots. On Tuesday, Supervisor of Elections Pete Antonacci began mailing postcards to the other 1 million voters, at a clip of 200,000 a day.
The process is happening across the state and will occur again before November’s general election, when turnout will be greater.
To reach the most people, Miami-Dade’s letter offers its “request a ballot” message in three languages: English, Spanish and Creole. Palm Beach’s postcard offers the message in English and Spanish. Broward’s postcard is English-only, except for directions to sign and date the card.
But how will Broward’s non-Englishspeaking voters know what they’re being asked to do? And why must they take the extra step of making a phone call to request a ballot? And why doesn’t the supervisor’s answering machine accommodate people who speak Creole? Broward is not required to offer voter information in Creole, but it previously did so as a matter of courtesy.
When county commissioners saw the supervisor’s draft message last week, Commissioner Beam Furr made an important observation: It failed to make clear that voters were being encouraged to request a mail ballot. “Good catch,” Antonacci replied.
Good catch? Good thing someone was looking over Antonacci’s shoulder. For a campaign that cost $245,000, the message crafted by Broward’s supervisor missed the mark.
Unfortunately, the commission did not catch the language issue, making Broward an outlier among the state’s three largest counties.
Antonacci became Broward’s elections supervisor in 2018 when former Republican Gov. Rick Scott appointed him to replace elected Supervisor Brenda Snipes, a Democrat whom Scott accused of incompetence and neglect of duty.
In advance of a pivotal 2020 presidential election, it was an odd choice to pick a
Tallahassee Republican to oversee elections in Florida’s second largest county — where Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one.
This is not the first time Antonacci’s actions have raised eyebrows. He also took a controversial step in fighting the Amendment 4 lawsuit, despite Broward voters having overwhelming voted to let former felons vote. Neither did he join other supervisors in pushing the Legislature for more time to certify election results — perhaps the biggest lesson from the 2018 recount debacle.
Meanwhile, in Washington, President Trump persists in his campaign to undermine voting-by-mail, saying that if it happens, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Trump’s attack is at odds with his own behavior. The president is registered to vote in Palm Beach and voted by mail in Florida’s presidential primary. And his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, a Tampa native, has voted by mail in Florida 11 times in the past decade, the Tampa Bay
Times reported.
McEnany told the Times she voted “absentee” because she was “absent” on election days. But Florida removed the word “absentee” from the mail-in ballot four years ago, replacing it with the more accurate “vote by mail” title. It has been two decades since Florida stopped requiring you to have an excuse to vote by mail.
The president’s crusade is also at odds with political reality.
The fact is, both parties like voting by mail because they can track who requested a ballot and who has yet to return it.
In reality, Florida Republicans have been more likely to vote by mail than Democrats. In the last presidential election, they outperformed Democrats at returning their mail ballots, too. So Trump is vilifying a voting method that has benefited him and his party.
He also ignores the fact that election supervisors have systems in place to verify the voter’s signature on every mail ballot.
Trump’s false claims about mail-ballot fraud prompted Twitter to place fact-check warnings on two of his tweets this week. In turn, the president signed an executive order Thursday to limit the broad legal protections enjoyed by social media companies.
Our advice: Tune out the political theater. Request a mail-in ballot. And show the president who’s boss — you.
If you missed the postcard, here’s the phone number: In Broward: (954)
357-7055. In Palm Beach County: (561) 656-6208.
Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Sergio Bustos, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.