Right-wing disrupters at the polls? Miami-Dade and Broward aren’t worried. Should they be? | Editorial
An Election Day that could bring big changes from Congress to local county commissions is just 10 days away. Across the country, election departments are also preparing for unexpected curve balls. Here in South Florida, elections officials say they’re not worried.
Should we be?
There are rumblings across the country that extreme-right conservative factions are planning to disrupt the election process.
The general warning is to the election departments, which should be cautious of, say, Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, both major presences in Florida, signing up to be poll workers and creating an intimidating, disruptive presence at precincts across the country.
For example, a poll worker with the voter rolls will conceivably know who you are and where you live. This is what they do in communist countries — without the voting part.
In Florida, intimidation practices are already under way, and under the cover of official authority. Gov. Ron DeSantis last month ordered the pre-dawn arrests of ex-felons, even though election authorities registered them to vote. That’s chilling.
Locally, authorities are trying to get to the bottom of an incident involving a canvasser stumping for Sen. Marco Rubio. The canvasser was beaten by two men, possibly for political reasons — or possibly not. Dogged Herald reporters continue to digging to determine the truth.
This week, the U.S. Conference of Mayors saw the need to hold a virtual seminar, “Discussion on Protecting Safe, Fair and Free Elections,” and issued this warning: “As Americans prepare to cast ballots, there is significant concern that next month’s midterm elections face a wide range of security threats, including foreign cyber interference, disinformation campaigns and voter intimidation.
”Nov. 8 is not a national presidential election, so the damage will probably be targeted locally, they said.
”The Proud Boys dismantled nationally in favor of joining state chapters,” Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told the mayors, according to their website.
Locally, we know that the Miami-Dade Republican Party has welcomed Proud Boys members, accused of playing a lead role in kicking off the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last year.
So what’s their plan for Election Day? Who knows? The Board asked both the Miami-Dade and Broward elections departments if they were taking any special precautions with the poll workers they are hiring; Miami-Dade will hire 5,000 and Broward, more than 3,000.
The answer from both departments is that they have not come across any issues or suspicious activity. Let’s hope they’re looking hard enough.
“I think those threats are happening in other parts of the country, but not here,” said Robert Rodriguez, Miami-Dade’s assistant deputy supervisor of elections.
In Miami-Dade, there will be some police officers at precincts and polling centers, but the heavy presence of law enforcement to stop trouble at polling sites can also be viewed as intimidating.
A similar sentiment is shared at Broward Elections. Ivan Castro, a department spokesman, said it’s business as usual in hiring poll workers and posting the normal number of poll deputies, or security guards, at precincts.
”We have not had any issues with our poll workers and we don’t expect to have any,” Castro said. “This is an issue in other states not here.”
Let’s hope he’s right.
