Earlier this year, the U.S. Justice Department halted a Florida voter purge after it was discovered that the list of 2,625 alleged non-citizens Gov. Rick Scott sent to Supervisor of Elections offices around the state was riddled with inaccuracies.
Now Scott has sent supervisors a second list, a new batch of 207 names allegedly ineligible to vote, with Election Day only about a month away. It’s one more indication of how politically fraught the SOE position can be. And in the first presidential election after Florida’s legislature passed a controversial voting bill, the race between Craig Latimer and Rich Glorioso to be Hillsborough’s new SOE has become a flashpoint in the state and national debate over voters’ rights, and an unusually charged battle for what some say should be a nonpartisan office.
Craig Latimer is chief of staff to current Hillsborough County SOE Earl Lennard. Latimer was among the first to notice that something was amiss in the initial voter purge. The state sent him a list of 72 suspect Hillsborough voters, but when he sent letters to those individuals inviting them to come by the office with proper identification if there’d been any mistakes, he got an unwelcome surprise.
“Immediately people began showing us their birth certificates,” he recounted recently. “We said, ‘This isn’t right.’”
Latimer and Lennard stopped the project, a step followed by almost every other supervisor of elections office when they discovered similar inaccuracies in Scott’s list. The U.S. Dept. of Justice halted the proceedings altogether on May 31.
The urge to purge goes back at least a year, to the Florida Legislature’s passage of HB 1355, the elections reform bill. Among other things, the bill reduced the number of days of early voting and radically shortened the time afforded to third-party groups to turn in new registrations.
Like the majority of his fellow Republicans in Tallahassee, Plant City House member Glorioso voted for that legislation — legislation that Latimer calls a “solution to a problem that didn’t exist.”
On the campaign trail, Rich Glorioso acknowledges that the Lennard/Latimer regime has cleaned up the SOE office tremendously from the mess they inherited four years ago. But he insists that there are still issues that need to be corrected, “and I know I can fix that.”
That “mess” is what is otherwise known as The Buddy Johnson Era. Like Glorioso, Johnson was a Plant City Republican who had previously served in the Legislature. He was named by then Governor Jeb Bush to replace Pam Iorio in 2003 when she left to run for mayor, and was elected for the first time in 2004 against Democrat Rob McKenna, even though there were already problems in the SOE’s office, including lost votes and slow tallies.
But Johnson’s reign of errors was just beginning. His office was beset by numerous problems, including illegally overspending his budget and using thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds for voter education materials that used his name and image during his 2008 re-election campaign. But after several years of investigations, the FBI announced in 2011 that he was not guilty of any federal crimes.
Latimer had just retired after a stellar career working his way up the ladder at the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office when he was selected by the late Phyllis Busansky to be her chief of staff after she defeated Johnson in his bid for re-election in 2008. And he stayed on the job after her sudden and unexpected death of a heart attack in 2009.
But Glorioso accuses the Lennard/Latimer team of being too reactive to events, not proactive, such as doing more outreach to the community.
“If I’m in charge of outreach, I’ve gotta own that process, and have the authority to put a team together and say this is how we’re going to do outreach,” says Glorioso, who rose to the rank of colonel in the U.S. Air Force after 27 years of service. “You have to continuously improve your process, or you’re falling behind.”
Glorioso says that the current office is failing to communicate in particular with blacks and Latinos. Michelle Patty, an activist in the black community, concurs, saying, “It has not been sufficient. A lot of people didn’t even realize it was Election Day [during the August primary]. There is no outreach in the community as before.”
Then again, Patty might not be the most unbiased source, as Buddy Johnson paid her more than $16,000 for voter outreach back in 2008.
In any event, Latimer disputes the charge, saying that representatives from the SOE’s office have participated in over 300 education-registration events in the county since the beginning of June.
Going deeper into the “reactive, not proactive” narrative, Glorioso cites the fact that 166 absentee ballots mailed out in New Tampa this summer omitted the Democratic House District 63 race between Mark Danish and Z.J. Haveez, and that the office didn’t know about it until informed by Danish. He also says that multiple registrations were listed at One Buc Place, the home of the Tampa Bay Bucs, a problem brought to the Hillsborough office’s attention by a group known as Tampa Vote Fair.
On the latter charge, Latimer says numerous proactive steps are taken to weed out business addresses listed incorrectly as home residencies, which is what a voter needs to use as his or her address on registration forms. Sometimes they’re not updated sufficiently, he says, such as the case at One Buc.
But Latimer says similar complaints from Tampa Vote Fair have proven unfounded, such as their concern that 80 people were registered at the same address. “It’s an RV Park,” he declares deadpan. Another multiple-voter address brought to him by Tampa Vote Fair turned out to be that of an assisted living facility.
“They gave us one and said, ‘There’s 23 people living here.’ Well, yeah, they are. They’re all registered voters and they’re all registered to vote there.”
A Lithia-based woman named Kimberly Kelley leads Tampa Vote Fair. The group is a local affiliate of True the Vote, a controversial Houston-based group that has been accused of harassing voters at the polls, though they have never been charged with any illegal activity.
Although a member of 9.12 (a Glenn Beck-inspired, Tea Party-esque organization), Kelley says her group of 100 cohorts is bipartisan, which is why she says she signed up to work with them.
“What made me choose True the Vote was that they were the only group where you could not see party affiliation,” referring to the voter database lists that are supplied by the parent group. She says around 30 members of her group are Democrats, and says she offered to speak at a Democratic party meeting (Hillsborough County Democratic chair Chris Mitchell says he doesn’t recall getting such a request).
Tampa Vote Fair has been concerned about felons on the Hillsborough County voting rolls. In August Kelley issued a press release claiming there were 79 instances of votes cast by felons in the county in the last two elections. She says SOE head Earl Lennard has been cooperating with her on the issue, and it has now gone to the state Division of Elections, which controls the felon’s list.
Kelley says her group’s mission is to rid the voting rolls of the dead or duplicates (people living at two different addresses). But her intention to have her minions act as poll-watchers on Election Day is creating concerns among some Democrats.
Hillsborough Democratic party activist Susan Smith says she worries about intimidation at the polls. And she says she doesn’t think Tampa Vote is sincere in the goals stated by Kimberly Kelley, saying, “If there’s voter fraud, we could understand it, but there’s really not a big problem with it.”
Hillsborough Democratic chair Chris Mitchell agrees. He calls Tampa Vote Fair “an arm of the Republican Party and voter repression.”
Poll watchers must represent a candidate or a political party at a particular precinct. Kelley jokes that she may decide to represent the independent candidate for property appraiser, because then “nobody can accuse me of anything,” she laughs, aware of the perception she’s doing the dirty work for the Republican party. “I’m independent.”
In some respect, the Hillsborough SOE race could be seen as a referendum on the state elections bill — especially given Glorioso’s role in passing it. Democrats say the bill was part of a national campaign championed by conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council whose ultimate goal is preventing Obama voters from going to the polls.
Besides reducing the amount of early voting days, HR 1355 consigns voters to provisional ballots (which often are not ultimately counted) if they have moved to a new county without informing their local supervisor of elections. And the radical reduction in voter-registration time for third-party groups like the League of Women Voters (the allotment went from two weeks to 48 hours) led the venerable group to announce it was shutting down its registration work, fearful of the financial sanctions of up to $1,000 per volunteer for turning in the forms late.
A federal judge this summer upended that last piece of the bill, allowing the League to resume registrations. Glorioso dismisses the requirement as a minor matter.
“I still believe that if you’re organized enough to get a voter registration drive together, you ought to be organized enough to make arrangements with the SOE’s office to get those turned in.”
Deirdre MacNab from the League of Voters strongly disagrees. “We believe the restrictions were insurmountable and unnecessary, and the judge agreed with us.”
Glorioso also defends the main provision of HB 1355, reducing the number of early-voting days. He says it will force SOE offices to stay open later, allowing working men and women the chance to vote after work.
For his part, Craig Latimer has seen no systemic indication of the voter fraud discussed so often by supporters of HB.
Gloriso has a piece of campaign literature that sounds as if he’s banking on Hillsborough voters believing that Buddy Johnson is still the man running the SOE’s office.
“Are you tired of the politics… Rhetoric… corruption… incompetency?” reads a campaign brochure that Glorioso and his campaign manager were distributing at a recent Tiger Bay event. The last line of the document asks, “What are we missing? Integrity.”
But when a member of the Tiger Bay audience asked Glorioso to whom he was referring, the outgoing state legislator backed off. “Earl Lennard has done a great job in restoring integrity in that office. I’ve proven my integrity. I’m not questioning my opponent’s integrity. I’m just saying I have the integrity to do that job.”
For his part, Craig Latimer says the proof is out there. “We’ve returned accountability and transparency to that office.”
The election takes place on Nov. 6. The last day to register is Oct. 9.
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2012.