Democracy is under attack, and voters in Miami are the targets | Editorial
A voter-fraud scheme seems to be emerging in Miami, aimed at some of our most vulnerable residents: seniors in public housing. If it’s true, it’ll be a new and shameful moment in voter disenfranchisement in Florida, where lawmakers’ push to restrict access to voting is continuing with unnerving vigor.
Residents of the Haley Sofge Towers in Little Havana have been coming forward, as WPLG Local 10’s Glenna Milberg first reported, to say that their voter registrations were switched without their knowledge to Republican after visits from canvassers, some wearing red caps and T-shirts that said “Republican Party of Florida.”
The Miami Herald reported Friday that a total of 103 people in that housing complex switched political-party affiliation in a three-month period — every single one of them to the Republican Party. Pretty hard to explain that without something odd going on.
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, reacting to the initial reports — along with other Democrats — called for an investigation. Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said last week that an investigation is under way, telling Local 10 that her office is taking the allegations “very seriously.”
The Republican Party of Florida has denied any involvement.
Troubling stories
It’s still unclear how many people’s registrations were changed and if this extends to other parts of the state, though there are some indications it might. But the individual stories that have emerged so far are troubling in the extreme.
Juan A. Salazar, a 77-year-old Dominican man who uses a wheelchair, told the Miami Herald that he had gone out to get some fresh air in the parking lot at Haley Sofge Towers when three canvassers in the Florida GOP red hats and T-shirts approached him, asking if he wanted to fill out an application for a new voter-registration card.
He’d been a registered Democrat since the ’70s and knew he got his card every year in the mail, but the canvassers insisted he would get it quicker if he filled out the form. When he got his new card a few weeks later, it said that he was a Republican.
He called it a “scam,” a way to keep people from voting in primary elections. (Florida has closed primaries.) He said he was concerned about what would happen in the next election.
Salazar is right to worry. How many people who plan to vote in the Aug. 23 primary election will check their registration cards in time to change them if they are wrong?
Plus there’s this other bit of context to consider: In a state where Republicans recently took the lead in registrations — an edge of about 67,000 voters out of some 14 million — and control both the governor’s office and the Legislature, every registration that turns red will help reinforce the GOP narrative of overwhelming dominance.
Republicans may argue that the party-switching is the result of their growing support in places like Miami-Dade County. Still, the individual voters coming forward are saying something far different.
Not in a vacuum
Our concerns about access to voting aren’t occurring in a vacuum. Florida is in federal court right now defending a raft of new provisions lawmakers approved last year that cut down on the use of ballot drop boxes and reduce the amount of time a vote-by-mail request is in effect, among other restrictions. This year, Gov. Ron DeSantis, who pushed for the passage of that bill last year, is asking the Republican Legislature for more, including an election police force, ostensibly to investigate voting-related allegations, though we have state attorneys for that responsibility already.
And then there was this oddity in North Miami. As the Miami Herald recently reported, an unusually high percentage of voters in last May’s local election were assisted in the voting booth — about 10.7% of voters. Countywide, just 1.4% of voters received assistance from people other than poll workers in the November 2020 general election. The number in Miami, Hialeah and Miami Beach was less than 1%.
North Miami has said the unusual level of assistance, which is legal if requested, was all perfectly fine. Yet several North Miami voters who received help told the Herald they did not need assistance. The public-corruption unit at the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office is looking into that situation, too, a source told the Herald.
So what do we make of the voting-booth issues raised in North Miami and the allegations of fraudulent party-switching from voters in a Little Havana public-housing complex? In other, more innocent days, we might have brushed off those concerns as isolated, maybe just a few bad actors at work.
But today we have the GOP calling the Jan. 6 armed attack on the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump’s followers “legitimate political discourse,” though the party tried to back away from that afterward, saying it didn’t mean those who committed actual violence. We have an ex-president who said he’d consider pardons for those convicted of crimes for storming the Capitol after he refused to admit he’d lost the election, a narrative he continues to push with the Big Lie. We have a governor who has successfully worked to reduce access to voting and is asking the Legislature to redraw legislative and congressional district lines that would dilute the Black vote.
Given all of that, how hard is it to believe that, in GOP-led Florida, the right to vote is truly under siege?
This story was originally published February 16, 2022 at 6:00 AM.