If there’s fraud in the casino gambling petition drive, Florida voters deserve to know | Editorial

County elections supervisors across the state are reporting possible widespread fraud among signature-gatherers in the push to expand casino gambling in Florida. Election-related fraud is serious stuff, and the alarms have been sounded. Where’s the urgency here? Where are the state leaders leaping to action?

There’s been plenty of time to investigate. A full seven weeks ago, as reported by the Miami Herald Thursday, Florida’s secretary of state, Laurel Lee, wrote a three-page letter to state Attorney General Ashley Moody. The Dec. 3 letter laid out information from six elections supervisors — in Duval, Gulf, Pinellas, Marion, Brevard and Bradford counties — who said they suspect hundreds of cases of fraud in the signature-gathering process for a proposed constitutional amendment.

The letter didn’t specify which constitutional amendment but supervisors told the Herald that the problems are coming from the casino gambling amendment — an initiative being financed by the Las Vegas Sands, whose late owner, Sheldon Adelson, was a megadonor for Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state Republican Party. Adelson’s widow, Miriam, has a majority stake in the company, which has spent $49.5 million trying to get an amendment on the November ballot to allow card rooms to be converted to Vegas-style casinos.

Need to investigate

We don’t know if that has influenced the apparent lack of official zeal on the issue. We do know that Florida’s voters deserve a full and expeditious investigation into the allegations.

The problems outlined in Lee’s letter aren’t minor. Some forms included the names of dead people. In Duval, the election supervisor referred more than 1,200 petition forms to local prosecutors. In Marion, Elections Supervisor Wesley Wilcox found his and his wife’s signatures forged on petition forms.

There are signs that the potential fraud may reach into South Florida, too. Broward County Elections Supervisor Joe Scott told the Herald he is discussing with the state attorney’s office a possible investigation there, because about half of more than 125,000 petitions he’s received for the gambling initiative have been rejected.

How much more a broader investigation would turn up, we can only imagine.

We need to know for sure. And on Friday, after the Editorial Board asked Moody’s office whether she would issue injunctions and stop any nefarious behavior, Moody gave us some reason to hope. She sent a letter to Lee’s office pushing much of the problem back onto the attorney general, saying the “serious nature” of the allegations warrants criminal investigation, rather than any civil penalties Moody’s office could impose.

But the letter also said Moody’s office has directed the statewide prosecutor to work with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and affected state attorney’s offices on potential criminal prosecutions.

“The filing of false, fraudulent initiative petitions undermines voter confidence and the electoral process,” it said, “and our office is committed to working alongside the secretary of state to act against those who undermine our electoral system.”

It sounds like somewhere in all that buck-passing there’s an actual investigation.

The Editorial Board has long advocated against gambling expansion in Florida. The state has plenty of casinos and card rooms and race tracks already, and we think expansion is bad, both for the state and for local businesses. We believe that any expansion should go before voters, not just lawmakers. Just last spring, the Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed through a massive sports-gambling deal for the Seminole Tribe, only to have it stymied, at least for now, by the courts.

If our state leaders, including the governor, are serious about pursuing election fraud when it comes to gambling, they’d be leading the charge — publicly — and demanding an investigation into the serious allegations brought by elections supervisors. Anything else looks like they only care when it doesn’t involve their friends.