In Miami-Dade’s first race for elections supervisor, a divide over who won in 2020

While running for a Miami congressional seat last year, Ruth Swanson repeated Donald Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election. Now Swanson, a Republican, is running to oversee all elections in Miami-Dade County as supervisor.

Swanson, an educator, was the subject of multiple videos last year when she answered questions from a TikTok personality conducting interviews at a Trump event.

Asked who won the 2020 election, Swanson answered “Trump” in the video posted in February 2022. She said of the U.S. Department of Justice: “I think they should have gone and taken what the evidence was in Arizona — and across the nation. They should have done their due diligence, and I don’t think they did.”

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As Miami-Dade voters prepare to join the rest of Florida in electing their county elections supervisor, the 2020 presidential election is helping define candidates for the soon-to-be partisan office.

Juan Carlos “J.C.” Planas, an election lawyer and former Republican office holder who joined the Democratic Party as Trump ran for reelection in 2020, cited false claims about President Joe Biden’s election as a reason for running for elections supervisor.

“Election denialism in the aftermath of the 2020 election shook me to my core,” Planas, 52, said in a statement Friday after filing to run at the Election Department’s headquarters in Doral. “More than any time in my life, our democracy was clearly under attack.”

Planas served in the Florida House of Representatives between 2002 and 2010 and represented multiple Republican candidates since leaving office, including Miami-Dade’s former mayor, Carlos Gimenez, now a GOP representative in Congress.

In recent years, Planas became a vocal critic of Republican office holders, calling Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a “wanna-be dictator” in an April Facebook post.

Planas is the third candidate to file for the office of election supervisor, currently an appointed post that reports to Miami-Dade’s Democratic mayor, Daniella Levine Cava.

In early 2025, the county’s Elections Department becomes an independent agency under Florida’s Constitution. Miami-Dade is the only Florida county with an appointed elections supervisor, but a 2018 amendment to the state constitution requires voters to elect the supervisor starting in 2024.

Under state rules, candidates for election supervisor compete in partisan primaries, so the Republican and Democratic nominees in Miami-Dade will face each other on the November ballot.

Willis Howard, a Democrat who is also running for Miami-Dade elections supervisor, emphasized he is a long-time member of his party. Asked about Swanson’s statements on the 2020 election, Howard said he wants to increase confidence in ballot results by making the county’s Elections Department more transparent.

“The system does work. It’s worked for 200 or 300 years,” said Howard, 49, a campaign consultant active in local races and a former chief of staff at the city of North Miami Beach. “When folks stop believing in the system, everything starts to crumble.”

A former English instructor in China for five years, Swanson said in a 2022 interview that she has been an advocate against the persecution of the mostly-Muslim Uyghur population in China since returning to the United States.

She challenged Gimenez for what was then the 26th District congressional seat in 2022 but did not qualify for the Republican primary ballot.

It was during that race that Swanson agreed to an on-camera interview in a parking lot with Jason Selvig, a host of the Good Liars social-media feeds, which post videos that tend to poke fun at conservatives.

Identified as a Republican congressional candidate, Swanson declined to offer evidence of a stolen election when pressed by Selvig. “I don’t think I want to go into all of it today,” she said.

Reached by phone this week, Swanson, 42, declined to be interviewed or state her position on the 2020 election results. “I’m not giving my opinion on that. Thank you,” she said.

While contradicted by the Justice Department under Trump and state-level investigations, public doubts that Biden won the 2020 election aren’t fringe in the Republican Party. Trump continues to insist the 2020 election was stolen, and he’s the leading contender for his party’s 2024 nomination.

In her 2022 campaign website for Congress, Swanson posted a statement from a supporter praising Swanson for “unrelenting action for election integrity and fixing the fraudulent election.”

At roughly the same time as her Good Liars encounter, Swanson gave an extended interview on the United Patriot Party YouTube channel. She said she joined the executive committee of the Miami-Dade Republican Party as part of a broader effort to bring true conservatives into local party leadership.

“We have managed to do some really good things,” she said. “We are trying to clean up the probable election fraud that has been happening, and trying to prevent it from happening in the future.”