Battle brewing over GOP voting restrictions

TALLAHASSEE — The Republican scheme to manipulate who votes in 2022 is moving to statehouses across the country, including Tallahassee, where a major partisan brawl will soon break out.

With Democrats in charge in Washington, federal legislation to make it easier to vote (H.R. 1, For the People Act) has a better chance to pass. Republicans, out of power in D.C., must use a state-by-state strategy to restrict voting. Florida is a huge battleground. Just watch.

Even though Florida Republicans had a very successful election in 2020, they want to impose new restrictions on voting next year, when Gov. Ron DeSantis faces re-election. They see the numbers and worry that way, way too many Democrats are voting by mail.

Republicans want changes even as DeSantis takes victory laps and boasts that Florida ran the most efficient election in the country.

He’s right, but he doesn’t deserve credit. It belongs to election supervisors, their staffs, canvassing boards and tens of thousands of poll workers who braved a deadly pandemic and smoothly handled a record 11.1 million ballots cast, nearly half of them arriving by mail.

This should be a moment of reflection, when supervisors are honored for a job well done and their advice is heeded. Instead, they are targeted by Republicans using Trumped-up talk of fraud to appease a party still convinced the election was stolen.

The Republican strategy includes repealing a law that makes mail ballot requests valid for two election cycles and requiring many voters to apply a second time for mail ballots in 2022. The GOP also may demand in-person security at remote drop boxes and allow case-bycase challenges to verification of signatures on mail ballot envelopes.

The latest wrinkle is for Republicans to portray county supervisors as tools of liberal out-of-state billionaires.

Florida’s 67 supervisors just received a four-page survey containing more than 70 questions from the House Public Integrity and Elections Committee asking about voting by mail, verifying voters’ signatures and “outside interference.”

The reference is to a Chicago nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), owned by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a reviled figure in Tallahassee as a “Big Tech billionaire.” That’s what DeSantis called him in his CPAC speech in Orlando Friday for supposedly censoring conservative thought, and it’s a hot-button issue with the GOP base.

The center offered $250 million to cities and counties to cover unforeseen election costs related to the pandemic and 12 counties asked for it and got it. They included the three big Democratic counties of Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. Five Republican counties received grants: Brevard, Escambia, Hernando, Lake and Wakulla.

The fourth-largest Democratic county, Hillsborough, got $2.9 million in grant money. Supervisor Craig Latimer spent most of it on nonpartisan voter education and the rest on poll worker recruitment, hazard pay, training and protective equipment.

As for the 70-question survey, lawmakers digging that deep on any issue is all too rare. One supervisor from a Democrat-leaning county called the survey “a witch hunt ... it’s bulls**t.”

The survey is so hush-hush that the House didn’t provide a copy Friday. Committee members in both parties (Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, a former state GOP chairman and point man on elections issues, and Rep. Allison Tant, a former state Democratic chair) separately confirmed they knew nothing about it. What survey? they asked me.

Why would a House committee survey independent elected officials and not tell its own members? It’s because larger political forces are at work.

“I don’t know why you would penalize supervisors for accessing additional dollars so more voters can vote,” Tant said.

Ingoglia said private grants should be distributed equally by the state because the big counties use it to help Democrats: “They use it to engineer one party to turn out more voters. It’s obvious,” he said.

Not true. A strong Republican turnout in Miami-Dade produced big wins and was critical to Trump’s victory. Former Broward election supervisor Pete Antonacci said he used grant money to hire janitors to clean voting sites and it was “well spent,” he told lawmakers.

Survey results are due next Friday and no doubt will form the basis of what’s next: an overhaul of voting by mail, drop boxes, signature verification and other issues. It’s all designed to influence whether you vote next time.