Florida election supervisors must keep asking hard questions

Imagine for a moment that you do terrific work, but you have a job where the rules keep changing and the people changing the rules don’t know or care what you do. But they are certain of this: They know your job better than you do.

Now you know what it’s like to be a county supervisor of elections in Florida, where politicians in Tallahassee write the rules.

Two decades after Florida’s wild presidential recount with its butterfly ballots and hanging chads, the 67 supervisors strive for professionalism, even as state political leaders from Gov. Ron DeSantis on down seek to undermine them every step of the way.

For the first time since COVID-19, supervisors met this week to get a grip on the future — the 2022 election. Florida’s election supervisors convened at a Marriott Hotel in Tampa, where federal cybersecurity experts discussed the threats posed by DVE (domestic violent extremists) and MDM (misinformation, disinformation and malinformation).

But the broader focus was Senate Bill 90, the Legislature’s ill-conceived and politically motivated law designed to help Republicans keep winning by making it harder to request a vote-bymail ballot, use a drop box and register to vote.

That’s plenty enough to make supervisors’ blood boil, but the same law turns them into criminals with fines of $25,000 for leaving ballot drop boxes unattended even briefly “if Grandpa has to relieve himself,” as the supervisors’ lobbyist, David Ramba, put it.

SB 90 took effect May 6. That’s the day DeSantis signed it in private in a West Palm Beach hotel where every news outlet except Fox News was excluded. That display of arrogance infuriated the media, but in hindsight, it was perversely fitting for a voting crackdown cobbled together in the middle of the night and rammed through with such defiance that Democrats at one point were denied the right to protest.

DeSantis’ self-promotional tour is over. That means the real work is just now beginning as elections experts dissect the law line by line before implementing this “absurdity,” as Lake County Supervisor of Elections Alan Hays, a former Republican state senator, called it.

At a question-and-answer session, county supervisors fired a flurry of questions at self-conscious staffers of the state Division of Elections about how to ensure that the law is faithfully executed while safeguarding a person’s right to vote — goals that will clash, and not by accident.

For example, SB 90 requires that voters who request a mail ballot must provide a driver’s license number, a state-issued ID number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number. But many voters registered years ago when such documents were not required. They may not have any of them, so how can they vote? (This could have been resolved if lawmakers sought supervisors’ advice when they wrote the law.)

Or this: The law says anyone can return mail ballots, but only those of immediate family members and two others. Yet it doesn’t explain how that is to be enforced. Are poll workers supposed to interrogate people dropping off ballots? Are they supposed to provide proof ? How do you prove your sister is your sister? The state offered little help other than to say suspicious behavior should be reported to authorities.

“I don’t know how big this person’s family is,” said Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Julie Marcus. “What are we supposed to ask this person? What would you do if you were us?”

Her questions were directed to the Florida Division of Elections, which, as an extension of the governor’s office, gingerly tiptoed around questions, surely because of four pending lawsuits challenging SB 90’s constitutionality.

That only added to supervisors’ anxiety.

There are many unanswered questions, but state officials are in a precarious spot. They can’t criticize SB 90 without ripping the governor. If they praise the law, they’ll infuriate supervisors who know it’s flawed. So the lawyer for the state would say, “that’s a good question,” which accomplished nothing.

DeSantis’ chief elections official, Secretary of State Laurel Lee, ended the questions at noon because of lunchtime. She missed a golden opportunity to keep the questions coming and delay the buffet line. Supervisors respect Lee and view her as an ally who’s trapped in a straitjacket as a DeSantis appointee. Eventually she may have to take sides, and she knows who’s right in this fight: the counties.

Florida supervisors are voters’ strongest and smartest allies. They need to keep asking questions and demanding answers. The trust of future elections is in their hands. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, Editorial Writer Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.