Hurricanes blow up Election Day hypocrisy

Broken tree limbs had been hauled away. Power lines fixed. The sand covering A1A was shoveled back onto Fort Lauderdale Beach.

Broward County had seemingly weathered Hurricane Andrew with only minor wind damage.

But eight days after landfall — Election

Day, 1992 — we discovered that the storm had deposed an icon.

Andrew may have only brushed Broward, but according to Broward Sheriff Nick Navarro, the hurricane left the county so strewn with political apathy that it skewed the election.

By his reckoning, Sheriff Nick had been defeated by a tropical storm.

Thirty years after the Navarro brouhaha, Florida’s in another tussle over how to stage a fair election in the aftermath of a hurricane. It brings back memories.

The 1992 dispute ignited when the two-term sheriff lost the Republican primary to a little known, under-financed, no-chance underdog named Jim Howard by six points.

For Nick, the only conceivable explanation was that damn storm.

Three days later, his lawyer asked the Broward County Canvassing Board to toss the results. “This vote cannot be correct because of this terrible hurricane, which has disenfranchised these voters,” he said.

He suggested that a sizeable chunk of Broward Republicans had been too immersed in hurricane relief work down in Homestead to vote in Broward.

The Canvassing Board was not persuaded. Broward Elections Supervisor Jane Carroll suggested that if Navarro got his election do-over, “I guess every loser will want to get back on the ballot.”

Such prophetic words. America has been suffering a rather prominent election-denying loser since 2020. Come to think of it, Navarro (who died in 2011) was a kind of Donald Trump precursor, as much a TV personality as a politician.

He was an impresario with a badge, who turned policing into cinema verité. In 1988, Navarro was the star performer on the original “COPS,” with a FOX News camera crew tagging after him and his deputies on crime-busting escapades. With creative editing, roundups of hapless (and often shirtless) street-corner crack dealers became mesmerizing stuff.

He made BSO into the slickest PR outfit in town. An arrest without a photo-op was like no arrest at all. A drug raid without TV cameras was the proverbial tree falling in a forest without an audience. When Nick’s undercover narcs ran short of rock cocaine, the BSO lab cooked them a batch.

His pursuit of rap musicians on obscenity charges brought him more national notoriety (and a First Amendment judicial smackdown).

Several of his homicide squad’s headline-grabbing murder convictions were contrived with coerced confessions or witness intimidation. No problem. The exonerations came years after the press conferences.

His stint at BSO was beset with scandals and cronyism. No matter. Voters remained besotted by his show-biz audacity.

Then came the storm.

Truth was, Hurricane Andrew’s only real impact on the election was to provide Nick an excuse for losing. Sure, he could have won a general election in any county in Florida.

But the fatal primary was limited to Broward Republicans, and Broward Republicans circa 1992 (think “country club”) weren’t much like the modern-day MAGA mob. After eight years of Nick, they tired of his antics.

But Navarro was right that election officials should consider whether natural disasters unfairly impede voting. He just had the wrong address.

That year, Miami-Dade, with its southern precincts in shambles, postponed its election for another week.

Four years ago, after Hurricane Michael smashed the Panhandle 27 days before the general election, then-Gov. Rick Scott issued an executive order that allowed eight storm-affected counties to extend early voting, loosen rules for mail-in ballots and relocate polling places.

Still, according to a study to be published next month in the Journal of Politics, voter turnout in those eight counties fell by 7%.

The study concludes, “In a year when the U.S. Senate race in Florida was decided by 10,033 votes, some 13,800 voters didn’t cast ballots because of the hurricane.”

On Oct. 12, after Hurricane Ian, Gov. Ron DeSantis stretched the very restrictions he pushed through the legislature to grant similar accommodations for voters in very Republican Charlotte, Lee and Sarasota counties.

But not for 21 other counties deemed disaster areas after Ian, including Democratic-leaning, flood-afflicted Orange County.

Unafraid of hypocrisy, Republican deniers still blame Trump’s lost election in 2020 on emergency voting exceptions crucial swing states enacted amid a raging pandemic.

At least Sheriff Nick quit his fight after a week, despite what he called a “legal and factual basis” to contest his stormy election loss.

The 2020 deniers are still at it.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @ grimm_fred.