Need to reform absentee voting has been obvious for many years

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Professional vote brokers collected hundreds of absentee ballots — often from nursing homes, assisted living facilities and senior centers — and delivered them to the county supervisor of election’s office.

Magically, the bundled ballots favored the very candidates who had hired the Sleazy brokers cajoled folks to vote for their clients; or altered their ballots if they didn’t.

“Can the public have confidence in the election results of close races? We are not certain they can,” a Miami-Dade grand jury warned in 2012.

Vote brokers had been sliming local democracy for years. A judge ordered a do-over in the 1993 Hialeah mayoral election after the incumbent lost at the polls but won reelection thanks to an improbable 70% advantage in absentee votes.

Four years later, Miami staged a second mayoral election after a judge decided the first had been perverted by “a pattern of fraudulent, intentional and criminal conduct” in absentee voting.

In 2008, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office investigated suspicious alterations to absentee ballots in the congressional race between incumbent Lincoln Díaz-Balart and challengers Raúl Martinez, but concluded “any chance of proving a crime is remote.”

The questionable votes had gone to DíazBalart. Martinez, whose own campaign operation had been implicated in Hialeah’s 1993

controversy, should have seen it coming.

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President Trump speaks of voting by mail as a subversive and corrupt process, contrived to sabotage his reelection.

He takes it much too personally. Election saboteurs were manipulating mail-in ballots long before Donald Trump bullied his way into politics. Especially in Miami-Dade County, regularly skewed local elections. There was another dust-up in the

2011 Hialeah mayoral election. Three brokers were arrested, one with a business card suggesting, “When the ballots arrive, call me because I work all the elections.”

Next, the chief of staff for then-U.S. Rep. Joe Garcia was arrested after attempting to procure nearly 2,000 absentee ballots.

So when Trump complains about the integrity of mail-in ballots, he’s dredging up old news around here.

Miami-Dade County finally passed an ordinance that makes it illegal for operatives to collect more than two marked absentee ballots for delivery to the elections supervisor. But for the state’s other 66 counties, vote harvesting remains legal. (State law, at least, now prohibits paying brokers. Also, no one can pick up more than two blank ballots from an elections office.)

Republicans, who have controlled the legislative process in Tallahassee for more than two decades, could have fixed that. They didn’t. For obvious reasons.

Republican voters typically have cast considerably more absentee ballots than Democrats, a big advantage for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, when 1.18 million Florida Republicans voted by mail compared to 1.03 Democrats.

Lately, Republican attitudes have changed. Now, vote-by-mail threatens to undermine our very democracy. Especially since 400,000 more Florida Democrats than Republicans have applied for absentee ballots so far in 2020.

After the 2016 elections, Trump supporters were obsessed with the unfounded notion that millions of illegal immigrants had voted against him — each one willing to risk a felony conviction and deportation over a single, statistically insignificant vote. (In a nation where

45% of legal voting-age citizens stayed home on election day, 2016.)

Lately, mail-in ballots have moved to the top of Trump’s list of election grievances. (Never mind that he voted absentee in the Florida primary.) The president wants voters, his voters anyway, to show up at polls in person on election day. Don’t worry about that mediahyped COVID-19.

His supporters seem inclined to do just that. A CBS News poll released July 12 found that, despite the infection risks associated with in-person voting, only 25% of likely Trump voters in Florida indicated that they’d vote by mail, compared to 59% of Biden supporters.

Weirdly, Trump’s mail-in ballot paranoia might work to his advantage come November. His followers, many of whom favor his advice over medical science, are more likely to risk their health lined up at the polls than Democrats, who seem much more unsettled by pandemic.

Which means Trump votes are more likely to be counted. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission found in 2018 that absentee ballots were three times more likely to be rejected than in-person votes. Mostly because voter signatures didn’t match those on record with the county elections supervisor.

It gets worse. (Or better for Trump). According to a 2018 study by the ACLU, young likely Democrat-voting Americans raised in the digital age sign their names so infrequently that the signatures aren’t uniform. A disproportionate share of their ballots get tossed.

Absentee voting can be a subversive process all right. Trump’s right for the wrong reason.

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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