In Florida, candidates who question integrity of elections campaign to oversee them
Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican Legislature have been in agreement since 2020: Florida’s elections have been the smoothest and most secure in the country.
But some members of their party don’t believe it — and are running to do something about it.
Across the state, about a dozen Republicans are vying to become elections supervisors this year with the help of individuals and organizations that are casting doubt about the integrity of those offices or alleging outright fraud.
Some contend that Florida’s elections have flagrant security lapses, including an exaggerated claim that the voter rolls contain suspicious entries. One said that former President Donald Trump was not only cheated out of the 2020 election but that some Republican supervisors and DeSantis were complicit in stealing the votes.
Others want to radically reshape the state’s elections by banning early voting and voting by mail or requiring that ballots be counted by hand.
The candidates are coordinating with each other in news conferences and online forums. Several have raised tens of thousands of dollars for their campaigns and tout the support of national election denial figures, including MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
“The machines, can they be trusted? Mail in ballots, were they all really legitimate?” says an online ad for Dave Schaffel, an information technology entrepreneur running for Collier County elections supervisor. Schaffel claimed during a news conference in April that he uncovered “anomalies” in vote-by-mail results “that defied statistical and mathematical principles.”
Schaffel’s opponent, incumbent Melissa Blazier, called the idea of Schaffel taking control of local elections “truly frightening.” She said he had provided no evidence of fraud in her office.
Trump’s campaign and candidates around the country are pushing claims that migrant non-citizens are registering to vote, which some of the candidates in Florida also allege. But when asked about some of these candidates challenging Florida Republican supervisors, Republican Party of Florida Chairperson Evan Power said the state’s ballots were “counted accurately” and the state has the nation’s “toughest election integrity laws.”
“People are going to come up with conspiracy theories,” Power said.
Lake County Elections Supervisor Alan Hays, a former Republican state lawmaker who faces a challenge in this month’s primary, said years of harassment and “lies” about election security since 2020 have discouraged several supervisors from seeking reelection.
“We’re tired of this crap,” Hays said. “We do not need this kind of nonsensical, idiotic distraction.”
“A conspiracy from the top down”
Florida has been a hotbed for election conspiracy theories since 2020, even though Trump won the state by 3 percentage points and DeSantis won reelection two years later by nearly 20 percentage points, a record for a Republican.
Some of those theories have morphed into campaign platforms.
In Pinellas County, candidate Chris Gleason, a data analyst, said he believes that Republican Elections Supervisor Julie Marcus erased votes and hid evidence in 2020. Marcus, who is seeking reelection, calls the claims “categorically false.”
In Palm Beach County, candidate Jeff Buongiorno, who also works in information technology, sued Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, Attorney General Ashley Moody and other state and federal officials last month, alleging they had not done enough to prevent non-citizens from voting. The case is ongoing.
“This is a conspiracy from the top down,” Buongiorno said during a July news conference.
Gleason, Buongiorno and the other candidates have formed a coalition and appeared together at news conferences, said Cathi Chamberlain, the founder of Pinellas Watchdogs, a local political club that has promoted Gleason’s campaign, and the coalition’s acting coordinator. She counts 13 people running for supervisor in the coalition.
“We’re just citizens trying to ensure that we fix our elections,” Chamberlain told the Herald/Times. “We’re seeing so many anomalies, and we’re being ridiculed, and we’re being made out to be the crazy people.”
But two members of the coalition did not endorse Chamberlain’s beliefs.
Osceola County supervisor candidate Jim Trautz told the Herald/Times he had not vetted the claims of fraud or election irregularities made by his counterparts in other counties. Trautz, a Navy veteran and former defense contractor, declined to say whether the 2020 election was stolen or if there was fraud in Florida.
He said he was running because of specific grievances with longtime Osceola Supervisor Mary Jane Arrington, including that her office twice sent out vote-by-mail ballots with the voters’ party affiliation on the envelope, which is prohibited by state law. Arrington told local reporters it was a printer’s error.
Trautz spoke at one of Chamberlain’s news conferences last month because “supporters asked me why I was not part of it,” he said.
Seminole County supervisor candidate Amy Pennock, who has been included on the candidate slate of 13, told the Herald/Times that she did not think the 2020 election was stolen and says so on her website.
“You can’t help who supports you and who follows you,” she told the Herald/Times. “You can just make sure on working to get your message out and communicate very well, and that’s really what I’m focused on.”
Proposing major changes
The candidates have a number of ideas that would upend the state’s elections.
Gleason told the North Pinellas Republican Club in June that on his first day in office he would “unilaterally cancel the contracts for all of the voting systems,” including for voting machine manufacturer Election Systems & Software.
Several said they want to ban the use of machines, which they distrust, to tabulate votes. Instead, they want to have citizens count votes by hand on Election Day, a tedious and less accurate method that has become more popular with Republicans across the country since 2020.
David Kalin, a part-time minister and former IT businessperson, is challenging Leah Valenti, a fellow Republican whom DeSantis appointed to Charlotte County elections supervisor last year.
Kalin said he believes the office has serious problems. Kalin said he has a radio frequency analyzer and knows that 99.9% of the ballot machines in Florida are connected to some kind of modem, making them vulnerable to hackers. He also says he has evidence of sensitive documents being taken out of the supervisor’s office.
“Our election systems are not secure,” Kalin said. “We’re told they’re secure but not a single person will prove they’re secure.”
If elected, he said he would pay for software out of his own paycheck to review the voter rolls and would like to use the federal E-Verify system to validate voters’ citizenship. (E-Verify is an online system that checks the citizenship status of employees.)
Valenti said that his claims about security issues are false and that he has never provided her office with any evidence to back them up. She dismissed the idea that he could enact major reforms as supervisor.
“If he’s saying he could do it differently, then he wouldn’t be upholding Florida election law,” she said.
Although elections supervisors carry out elections in the state’s 67 counties, the job is mostly administrative. State law and the Division of Elections, not the local supervisors, set rules about when elections can be held, what forms of identification are required and which machines local supervisors can use.
“I know these people think they are going to come into this office and make all these dramatic changes,” said Blazier, the Collier County elections supervisor. “But Florida law isn’t going to allow them to do that.”
Florida the “gold standard”
The candidates’ ideas aren’t entirely original. Some had been gaining traction among Republicans in the state Legislature, though recent legislative efforts had stalled.
Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, this year proposed a bill doing away with most mail-in voting. It did not receive a hearing.
State Rep. Bernie Jacques, R-Seminole, proposed legislation this year to remove the requirement that supervisors use machines to count ballots and allow them to count ballots by hand. Twelve other Republicans signed on to co-sponsor the bill, but it did not receive a hearing. (Jacques endorsed Marcus, the incumbent Pinellas supervisor, over her opponent, Gleason, who is alleging fraud.)
DeSantis, meanwhile, has repeatedly called Florida the “gold standard” for elections and rejected the idea that there is widespread fraud occurring in the state. But even he signed legislation in 2021, 2022 and 2023 that made changes to voting by mail, the use of drop boxes and how people can register to vote, and created a new office to investigate election crimes.
The political climate and the laws signed by DeSantis have contributed to some of the nine supervisors choosing not to run for reelection this year.
Monroe County Elections Supervisor Joyce Griffin, who has done the job for 40 years, said she was leaving the job because of the frequently shifting legislation.
“They’re passing laws that are breaking us,” Griffin, a Democrat, said. “It’s crazy out there. I’m too old and I’m too tired, and I’m not putting up with this anymore.”