The popularity of voting by mail reached new heights in Florida’s 2020 election, and while that was mostly an urgent necessity caused by the pandemic, it contributed greatly to a huge statewide voter turnout.
This should be cause for celebration. But they’ve been working overtime in the dark and dingy Republican Voter Suppression Laboratory in the state Capitol in Tallahassee. From the looks of things, way too many Democrats are voting by mail, and the Republicans don’t think that’s a good idea, so they have to change the law.
The Republican-led Senate Ethics & Elections Committee will take up a bill Tuesday that will make voters work harder to get mail ballots. Under current law, a mail ballot request is valid through two election cycles, or up to four years. The bill would require voters to ask for a mail ballot over and over, every calendar year, year after year.
The bill, SB 90, is sponsored by Sen. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, who chairs the elections panel.
The day after last month’s horrible insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Baxley tweeted that Florida has “much to be proud of” in the way it ran the last election. He’s right about that. So why the sudden clamor to change the law?
Just a hunch, but 45% of Democrats voted by mail in Florida in November, compared to 31% of Republicans (many of whom heeded former President Trump’s advice that voting by mail was “a terrible thing.”) Republicans, who had a highly successful election, crushing Democrats in numerous races, outperformed Democrats in early voting and on election day.
If you need further proof of bad motives, it’s found in the final few lines of the two-page proposal. The change applies retroactively to the next election in 2022 when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is running for re-election. Sources tell me that Democrats have already amassed a major advantage over Republicans in mail ballot requests for the next election.
This bill would wipe out that advantage completely. Everyone with a request on file for a mail ballot in the next election would have to request it all over again.
“It breaks a good faith contract we had with those voters,” said Mark Earley, supervisor of elections in Tallahassee’s Leon County, who dislikes the bill. “Suddenly we’re changing the rules.”
Here’s another tipoff that this idea is highly suspect: It was not proposed by the statewide association of supervisors of elections in all 67 counties, the voting experts in Florida.
“Absolutely not,” says the group’s president, Hillsborough County Supervisor Craig Latimer in Tampa, who sees it as unnecessary, confusing and expensive.
“It’s going to cost us multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars just to explain this to voters and to educate them,” Latimer told me. “This presents a hurdle to voting, especially to our older population, which is not as mobile, and to the military.”
Now that’s interesting. If there are two groups of voters that neither political party wants to antagonize, it’s seniors and those defending our country overseas. Latimer says those groups are hurt most by a requirement that voters constantly renew vote-by-mail requests.
Baxley said the change is needed because people move around so much.
“As mobile a society as we are, this could be out of alignment,” Baxley told me. “I know people who have moved three or four times in two years, and if they’re not updating (their addresses), they’re not getting the right ballot…. It’s just opening it to the opportunity for something to go wrong.”
Not true, Latimer said. People move all the time, but if a voter moves, the post office returns the ballot. He said a ballot can’t be voted by anyone other than the person who requests it. That’s why signature verification is such a big deal.
Baxley’s bill will be debated on Tuesday and members of the general public who want to testify must be in a room at a nearby basketball arena, the Donald L. Tucker Center.
Republicans have a 5-4 advantage on the elections panel, so it’s definitely going to be a close vote. Two of the four Democrats on the committee are from Palm Beach County: Lori Berman of Boynton Beach and Tina Polsky of Boca Raton. The other Democrats are Sens. Annette Taddeo of Miami and Randolph Bracy of Orlando.
To paraphrase Senator Baxley’s tweet, the price of being able to vote in Florida is eternal vigilance, especially when the Legislature starts messing with the election laws.
Steve Bousquet is a Sun Sentinel columnist in Tallahassee. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240, and follow him on Twitter @stevebousquet.
