WASHINGTON (Grey DC) – Election safety is making headlines lower than per week earlier than Florida holds its main Election Day. Nevertheless, Democratic candidates, elections officers and authorities watchdog teams say it isn’t as huge of a deal as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) is making it out to be. Although the teams are mentioning different challenges going into the first.
“No person’s extra inquisitive about election safety than supervisors of elections, frankly,” mentioned Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections for Leon County and the president of the Florida Supervisors of Elections, the affiliation that oversees all 67 county supervisors.
Early says whereas he helps accountability measures, there’s not a big, coordinated effort to undermine Florida’s elections.
“What we’re seeing is numerous stress from outdoors teams which are sure that there’s large, coordinated fraud. And what that’s doing is admittedly hampering our capability to get our jobs completed,” Earley mentioned.
On Thursday, Gov. DeSantis introduced the brand new Workplace of Election Crimes and Safety discovered 20 convicted felons in Palm Seashore, Broward and Miami-Dade Counties allegedly dedicated voter fraud by voting within the 2020 election.
DeSantis mentioned, “There’s going to be different grounds for different prosecutions sooner or later. They’re disqualified from voting as a result of they’ve been convicted of both homicide or sexual assault.”
In the meantime, good authorities teams like Widespread Trigger Florida say some voters have come to them with confusion about casting their ballots due to new state legal guidelines proscribing mail-in voting.
“We’ve additionally seen that in lots of instances, in counties the place beneath the Voting Rights Act they’re required to have signage and supplies in each Spanish and English, that we haven’t seen the identical stage of signage in Spanish,” mentioned Amy Keith, CCF’s program director.
Additionally, the 2 prime Democratic gubernatorial candidates, Congressman Charlie Crist and Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, say DeSantis ought to focus extra on serving to thousands and thousands of voters solid a poll somewhat than penalizing a handful of individuals.
“Nicely all of us need safe elections nevertheless it’s humorous that the governor got here out proper after the final presidential election and mentioned it was among the finest elections we had,” mentioned Crist.
“Sadly, he’s now spending taxpayer {dollars} to go and create this election police for one objective and one objective solely. And that’s to suppress votes and to intimidate people on the poll field,” mentioned Fried.
And so far as any issues about hackers hacking into voting machines, Earley says he has not seen or heard of any instances. He added all ballots are additionally recounted throughout post-election audits.
Copyright 2022 Grey DC. All rights reserved.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gray/AAIQ5VSXYRA6NEVLTEXTFR4SOI.jpg "Democratic candidates, elections official, government watchdog group say Florida’s elections are secure following Gov. DeSantis’ announcement revealing alleged fraud in 2020 election")
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25739950/247386_Elon_Musk_Open_AI_CVirginia.jpg "Inside Elon Musk’s messy breakup with OpenAI")
