Weakness in an election system is exposed is when there’s a close race. I think a lot of people believe that all election officials are partisan and captured, but in my experience (admittedly anecdotal and local) that’s not true. For “career” people here, “landslide!” is their favorite result no matter which side wins, because that result won’t be contested. It has built-in credibility. It’s easier.
In Ohio, the weakest link in our process is provisional balloting. We found that out here when we had a very tight judicial race in 2010 and there were state and federal lawsuits, actual fact-finding rather than opinion or speculation, and a federal judge applied careful, diligent, serious thought to sworn testimony from poll workers and voters. She listened to them. She took it apart. She found out what happened. She discovered that many people didn’t know the rules, and thus the rules were applied differently from precinct to precinct. That’s a failure. Voters shouldn’t have to rely on a lucky draw or a clever advocate to get their provisional ballot handled properly, but that’s what happened.
This is a huge failure on the part of the Florida Governor and his appointees. Maybe it won’t matter, they won’t get caught out, but if it does matter, people should know what happened and what led to chaos and litigation and yet another hit to the credibility of our election system. It wasn’t unavoidable. It wasn’t a perfect storm or bad luck. They knew it going in:
Most Florida voters don’t know it, but come the Aug. 14 primary election, the majority of them won’t have the same opportunities to cast a ballot as Floridians in five counties because the state is enforcing two different sets of rules. That’s the basis of the latest lawsuit seeking to halt Gov. Rick Scott’s assault on voting rights. And it shows how determined the governor is to ignore law and precedent in order to manipulate the election process.
On June 29, the American Civil liberties Union of Florida, the National Council of La Raza, the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights organization, and state Sen. Arthenia Joyner, D-Tampa, filed an administrative petition challenging the state’s policy that has created an illegal, dual system of elections.
Five Florida counties (Hendry, Hardee, Collier, Monroe and Hillsborough) operate under rules that were the law before 2011. These counties are “covered jurisdictions” under the Voting Rights Act. Consequently, any change in voting law or procedure must be approved (“precleared”) by the U.S. Justice Department or the federal court in Washington before it can be implemented. The remaining 62 Florida counties are operating under rules approved by the 2011 Legislature and immediately implemented by the Scott administration.
There are now different election laws and procedures on either end of the bridges across Tampa Bay; different rules for Naples and neighboring Bonita Springs; different rules for Miami and the Florida Keys. Joyner’s district spans three counties that operate under two different voting laws. This is a recipe for chaos and confusion. Has Scott forgotten Florida’s embarrassing performance in the 2000 election?
Conducting an election with rules that vary from county to county also violates Florida law requiring the secretary of state as chief election officer to “maintain uniformity in the interpretation and implementation of the election laws.”
The secretary, an appointee of the governor, is ignoring established interpretations of election law that governed the administration of elections under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
In 1998, facing an almost identical situation of a new election law and a required Voting Rights Act review, the secretary of state followed a Division of Elections advisory opinion that election law changes not be implemented anywhere until the law received approval.
The division determined that all 67 Florida counties must enforce the existing election code and not implement changes that had yet to be federally approved: “To do otherwise … has the potential to cause widespread voter confusion, affect the integrity of the election process, impair uniform application of the election laws and could violate federal and state law.”
The governor of Florida and his political appointees have designed this thing to fail when it’s tested with a close race. If it does fail and we see the lower-level career people or poll workers or voters on television remember: they’re not the bosses. There will be an effort to cover for the top people, because somewhere along the way we’ve decided that top executives and managers get all of the rewards but none of the responsibility.
Florida leaders have abandoned a Florida advisory opinion, the state’s own tragic history and experience with election administration, and common sense. They have a rock-bottom duty of basic competence in administering an election and they’ve already failed at that if a court has to order them to apply rules consistently. They should know that. They DO know that. They’re going forward despite knowing that.