Name: Republican plan to make it harder to vote by mail in Florida seen as ‘massive voter suppression’
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Republican plan to make it harder to vote by mail in Florida seen as ‘massive voter suppression’

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AdvertisementBy South Florida Sun SentinelMar 10, 2021 at 5:49 pmStung by how well Democrats did vote-by-mail ballots last year, Republicans who control state government are making sure it doesn’t happen again by changing Florida election law to make it more difficult for citizens to use mail voting.Millions of Florida voters would be affected by new rules that would make them jump through more hoops to obtain mail ballots and make it more difficult to turn them in. One major change would be eliminating drop boxes set up at elections offices and early voting sites which people have used to return their mail ballots.Advertisement“The impact of this is huge,” Broward Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott said. “This is a flat-out ban that will prevent everyone from dropping off their vote-by-mail ballot to their Supervisor of Elections and amounts to massive voter suppression.”Democratic and Republican supervisors of election opposed the legislation. “We are against this bill, vehemently,” Mark Earley, the Leon County supervisor of elections, told state senators at a hearing on the legislation. “This bill appears to be setting us up for another 2012, when we had long lines, chaos and confusion.”AdvertisementAnd Trish Neely, secretary of the League of Women Voters of Florida, said key provisions of the legislation make “absolutely no sense unless you’re looking for ways to suppress the vote.”Republicans on a key state Senate committee pushed through the changes Wednesday, even after acknowledging they in last year’s record-setting vote by mail that would be fixed by the changes they advanced.State Sen. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, chairman of the Ethics and Elections Committee and sponsor of the restrictive legislation, said last year’s election was “excellent, excellent” and conducted with “very high credibility.”But, Baxley said, his changes would make elections even more secure by installing more “guard rails on the highway to make sure no one runs off.”Democrats, outnumbered in the state Legislature, objected — but were powerless to do anything about it. The Governmental Oversight and Accountability Committee approved on a 4-2 vote with Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed.Key changes:Baxley said he didn’t have evidence of fraud or other problems with the drop boxes, but said that doesn’t mean there aren’t any issues. “The challenge is that you don’t know what you don’t know,” he said.Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Christina White said via email the drop boxes “were implemented very successfully” last year. “It would be a great disservice to voters to eliminate them moving forward.” White said more than 160,000 of her county’s voters returned their ballots through drop boxes.AdvertisementLink said the drop boxes at the four county elections offices in 2020 were watched by an office staffer during the day and by a sheriff’s deputy overnight and on weekends, video recording was in place at each, and they were bolted down. Drop boxes at early voting sites were all staffed during early voting hours. When the sites closed, all ballots were picked up and taken to the ballot processing center; none was left overnight.“We need drop boxes,” Link said. “They were just incredibly useful to our voters. We have a lot of people who work form 8:30 to 5. They can’t come in during office hours.”Scott said drop boxes are often used by one family member to drop off the ballots from everyone in a household, and without them some people wouldn’t be able to vote.“This will disproportionately impact working families and people with disabilities who have trouble getting to the polls,” he said. “There isn’t a single good reason to take them away now.” In 2020, he said, 74,716 ballots in Broward were returned to drop boxes at elections offices and 148,747 were turned in at drop boxes at early voting sites.Link said canceling ballot requests made last year would make it more difficult for voters, and it would be expensive to communicate the changes and input the information from all the new applications and waste all the time and money spent last year.Hays told his former legislative colleagues during his testimony before the Senate committee that taxpayers would have to spend $14 million to $16 million to implement the changes. “Do you really wish to impose on the counties this added expense of $16 million and alienate 6 million voters who have [mail ballot] requests on file?”AdvertisementThe Florida move is part of a nationwide Republican effort to change voting laws in ways that experts say are aimed squarely at making it harder for Democrats to win future elections.It comes after Republicans did extraordinarily well in Florida voting last year: former President Donald Trump won the state, though he lost nationally; Republicans defeated two incumbent Democratic members of Congress; and Republicans hold eight more seats in the Florida Legislature than they did a year ago.In every election since 2000 — except 2020 — Republicans in Florida used mail ballots more than Democrats. That changed last year because Democrats, who polls showed were more concerned with the coronavirus pandemic than Republicans, turned to mail voting in unprecedented levels.At the same time, then-President Donald Trump led a nationwide effort to falsely claim mail voting is riddled with fraud. As a result, Republican leaders acknowledged, some of their party’s voters who had used mail voting before abandoned the practice.Though more Democrats used mail voting last year for the first time, plenty of Republicans cast mail ballots and also would be inconvenienced by the new rules.Of the 6 million people who requested and received mail ballots for the November 2020 election, 4.9 million people used them, which works out to 44% of every vote cast in the state last year. Those numbers include 2.2 million Democrats, 1.1 million no-party-affiliation/independent voters — and 1.5 million Republicans.AdvertisementTwice-weeklyA lunch-hour look at what's trending in Florida politics. &gt; Mail ballots have remained popular. In the five city, town and village elections in Broward on Tuesday, 77% of the 17,665 votes were mail ballots. Final numbers weren’t available Wednesday, but as of early Tuesday evening, about 45,000 mail ballots had been cast for the elections in 19 municipalities, which Link said represented some 70% of the votes cast.If the changes become law, they would alter the rules for 2022, when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., will be running for re-election. DeSantis won the 2018 election by 32,463 votes. That year, when Republicans enjoyed their traditional advantage with mail ballots, there were 54,208 more Republican mail ballots cast than Democratic.The legislation specifically bans providing mail ballots to voters who haven’t requested them, something that was a frequent complaint raised by Trump last year. Although some states do mail unsolicited mail ballots, Florida law already prohibits the practice and requires voters to request them. Rich Templin, who represents the Florida AFL-CIO in Tallahassee, said some of the provisions seem “like a list of talking points espoused by one, well, formerly very powerful person,” referring to Trump.State Sen. Joe Gruters, R-Sarasota, a member of the governmental oversight committee and chairman of the Florida Republican Party, said the legislation is designed to “protect the integrity of the system” by making it “as easy as possible to vote and as hard as possible to cheat.”“This is not going to restrict. This is not going to disenfranchise. It’s not going to confuse,” Gruters said.State Rep. Omari Hardy, a Palm Beach County Democrat, said on Twitter that Republican claims they want to protect election integrity are not true. The effort to eliminate all drop boxes for mail-in ballots, Hardy warned on Twitter, “is voter suppression. This is electoral point-shaving. It’s Jim Crow all over again. It must be stopped.”AdvertisementAnthony Man can be reached at or on Twitter @ Advertisement

AdvertisementBy South Florida Sun SentinelMar 10, 2021 at 5:49 pmStung by how well Democrats did vote-by-mail ballots last year, Republicans who control state government are making sure it doesn’t happen again by changing Florida election law to make it more difficult for citizens to use mail voting.Millions of Florida voters would be affected by new rules that would make them jump through more hoops to obtain mail ballots and make it more difficult to turn them in. One major change would be eliminating drop boxes set up at elections offices and early voting sites which people have used to...

Republican plan to make it harder to vote by mail in Florida seen as ‘massive voter suppression’

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