Florida’s supervisors of elections, a bipartisan group of professional public servants who keep their personal politics out of their offices, have issued a strong and timely statement in response to the most serious danger our nation has faced since the Civil War.
“Public trust in our democracy is being systematically undermined, to the detriment of all Americans,” they warned.
That should not be necessary, but it is. Here’s why it matters.
The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6 was hardly a one-and-done event. That violent episode erupted from a continuing campaign of sedition that still festers every time Donald Trump or one of one of his toadies parrots his “big lie,” refuses to concede that President Joe Biden won fairly, or asserts that the nation’s election system is “rigged.”
The objectives are to destabilize our democracy, sabotage the Biden administration and set in motion enough state legislatures to overturn the next election they lose. That has dire implications for the future.
More than two-thirds of Republican voters believe Trump’s “big lie.” Only a few of their elected representatives have shown even minimal courage to refute it. More than half of Trump’s partisans in Congress, including 13 from Florida, refused to certify some of Biden’s electoral votes. In two Florida counties where Trump won handily, Republicans are baselessly demanding audits of the results.
It is to the election supervisors’ great credit that they have taken on our domestic saboteurs. Their document merits a place in the National Archives.
“The strength of our nation,” they said, “rests on the ability that ‘We the People’ have a voice in its governance and are confident in the integrity of our elections. … During and after the 2020 Presidential Election, the integrity of our democracy has been challenged by misinformation, disinformation and malinformation that sows discord and undermines trust in America’s electoral process.”
The document explains how Florida requires all voting to be on paper ballots, to be counted only on certified and publicly tested machines, and to be routinely audited after each election.
Florida supervisors have well-earned reputations for leaving their party preferences at home, even though they must run for office under party labels — over their objections. On those rare occasions when an election was mishandled, such as in 2018 in Broward (which thankfully has shed its regrettable reputation), it inevitably is owed to simple incompetence — not fraud or misconduct.
Election administration is technologically demanding work with the constant threat of cyberattacks and no margin for error. The 2000 presidential election was cast in doubt by Florida’s obsolete punch card system along with a misaligned ballot design in Palm Beach County.
But that’s history now. Florida’s 2020 election was a model of efficiency and reliability, as even Gov. Ron DeSantis has stated. Nothing about it justified what DeSantis and the Legislature have done to make voting more inconvenient. That, too, is a spinoff of the national campaign to undermine democracy.
Another consequence of that is the danger posed to election officials by people hiding in the anonymity of the internet to threaten their lives. Sad to say, nothing is helped when a political committee for DeSantis sends out a fundraising appeal falsely accusing Democrats of trying “every trick in the book” to sway the 2020 election.
The worst possible tricks, as The Washington Post reported, were hatched by Republican operatives meeting at the Willard Hotel in Washington to scheme up a justification for Vice President Mike Pence to reject critical Biden electoral votes when Congress met to count them Jan. 6.
When Pence resisted the pressure, Trump called him out to the crowd at the rally that degenerated into an assault on the Capitol, where some shouted “Hang Mike Pence!”
The Willard schemers included Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, and Trump strategist Steve Bannon, whom the House has cited for criminal contempt for defying a subpoena to testify to the select committee investigating what happened before, during and after Jan. 6.
The tactics included a conference call with Trump himself to some 300 state legislators to persuade them to decertify their state results. That sought to exploit a danger that will persist and likely will intensify as long as the Electoral College is vulnerable to manipulation.
For now, however, Florida elections are in capable hands.
Needless to say, a good system can always be made better. Leon County showed the way when it adopted a system from the company Clear Ballot that allows every race in an entire election to be audited electronically within days, if not hours, after polls close. Once the ballots are counted, they are fed into high-speed scanners that record images of each one. Broward also has that system.
Most other counties still rely on auditing a sample of ballots. The Legislature should provide the money, and motive, for all of them to do it universally. But that would require what’s lacking in Tallahassee: a real commitment to election integrity.
