Miami won’t have an NBA voting site after county picks Frost Museum over AA Arena

After the administration of Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez said Friday it rejected the Miami Heat’s proposal to bring an early-voting site to the AmericanAirlines Arena, the team released a statement suggesting the decision may be an attempt to “quiet our voice on the critical importance of voting.”

“To say we are disappointed is an understatement,” the Heat said in its statement. “But to the extent that forces involved in making this decision think this will quiet our voice on the importance of voting, they should know we will not be deterred.”

A county elections administrator said one drawback was whether the Heat arena could be an early-voting site in years beyond two weeks of early voting that begin Oct. 19. If not for the COVID emergency that led the NBA to play games in Orlando, the fall election would overlap with the start of the 2021 NBA season in Miami. Instead of the arena, Miami-Dade is using the nearby Frost Science museum as a downtown Miami early-voting site.

“Continuity and consistency for the voters is very important,” Elections Deputy Director Suzy Trutie said. But the Heat’s statement said the team made a “commitment to make the arena available for the same purpose in future years.”

She said Gimenez, a Republican candidate for Congress in November, approved the decision to pick the Frost site over the county-owned arena, which the Heat manages under a long-term agreement.

Gimenez’s decision excludes Miami from the NBA’s well-publicized effort to turn its basketball arenas into voting sites for the fall election. The Heat statement said the Orlando arena was set to be converted into a polling place, and that the AmericanAirlines Arena’s ample parking and high visibility would make it a natural pick over the Frost.

The team also said it saw the location as a way to drive voter turnout, given the chance for residents across the county to visit an early-voting site that doubles as the home court for the Miami Heat.

“After all, our facility has a storied history of attracting and serving our friends and neighbors across Miami-Dade,” the statement said.

Heat executives were not available to elaborate on what the team meant by “forces” behind the decision possibly being interested in quieting the Heat’s voice on voting.

In a statement released late Friday, Gimenez noted the science museum was a longstanding early vote site in its former Coconut Grove location and that the track record gave the county confidence in bringing voting to the museum’s new location. Gimenez said he “appreciated” the Heat’s offer, but that the Frost made more sense.

“We encourage and support the Heat to exercise their First Amendment right to express their political views,” Gimenez said at the end of the statement. “Our decision was based on the best location to serve all County voters.”

Miami-Dade has 33 early voting sites for the general election. The Heat offer arrived at an opportune time, because the county said it couldn’t use the Arsht Center in 2020 for a downtown site like it has in past years. That left the department to choose between the AA Arena and Frost, which are about five blocks apart on Biscayne Boulevard.

Trutie said Elections recommended to Gimenez that the Frost site be used instead of the arena. She said a top selling point for the Frost site was access to transit because it’s steps away from the Museum Park Metromover station.

Heat Coach Erik Spoelstra said the decision left him “just extremely disappointed.”

“It’s a little bit of a surprise. We thought that we were on the goal line to be able to get it done, and we had really worked with the county to check all the boxes that they seemingly wanted checked,” he said. “It would have been a perfect place.

“But I will promise you this: This is not going to stop us. We’re going to get involved one way or the other. We’re just going to strategize, recalibrate, figure out what step we can take from here,” he said. “That’s with or without the county. It’s just really disappointing that that’s the decision they made.”

In its statement, the Heat said the county seemed ready to approve a voting site at the arena and then changed course on Friday with no explanation. The team characterized the arena as a way to drive turnout as a “safe and even exciting” location.

After tours of the facility, “we were led to believe we would be receiving an agreement to solidify all that had been discussed and make it official,” the statement said. “We were under the impression that approval was imminent.”

Since the spate of racial justice demonstrations this summer, the NBA pushed to have its franchises across the country open up idle arenas to voters in the fall. Some arenas negotiated agreements with local election boards to be polling sites, and some have not.

Trutie confirmed the Miami Dolphins also offered its site, Hard Rock Stadium, as a polling place in Miami Gardens, but the county declined that offer as well.

A team spokesman said the Dolphins offered Hard Rock in the summer to promote “voter awareness” but that the snag came as football prepares to resume under COVID rules. That would be a problem with early voting on Sundays, and the spokesman called game-day voting “an operational impossibility.”

This story was originally published September 4, 2020 at 4:29 PM.