‘It’s Tallahassee politics.’ Miami leaders slam bill to wipe mail ballot requests

Miami-Dade County leaders are slamming GOP-backed legislation moving through Tallahassee that would cancel existing mail ballot requests for millions of voters around the state, including more than 100,000 living in Miami-Dade cities with autumn elections.

Should it become law, SB 90, sponsored by the Republican chair of the Florida Senate Ethics and Elections Committee, would cancel all standing mail ballot requests on July 1, forcing voters to file new applications with their local supervisor of elections if they want to continue to vote by mail.

In Miami-Dade County alone, more than 404,000 voters scheduled to receive mail ballots over the next two years would be wiped from the list, according to Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections Christina White. Of those voters, more than 100,000 live in cities with elections scheduled this fall, White wrote in a memo Tuesday to Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

Sen. Dennis Baxley, the bill’s sponsor, said he feels that by “doing a restart,” Florida’s voter file would be more accurate, though he acknowledged in an interview that there were no problems in the 2020 election caused by inaccuracies on the voter roll. His legislation — filed amid GOP efforts to curtail mail voting around the country following a surge in Democratic mail voting during the 2020 election — would also cut the maximum duration by which voters can request mail ballots from four years to two.

“I would like to say we are staying ahead of our challenges instead of waiting until we have some big problem to fix,” said Baxley, from Ocala.

But White wrote in her memo that she strongly opposes most of the bill’s language due to the “possible impacts to the over 1.5 million registered voters we serve,” noting that Baxley’s proposal comes amid a pandemic.

“We should be making it easier, not more difficult, for voters to vote from the safety of their homes, particularly during the COVID pandemic. This bill rolls back a law that has been in place for a decade without cause, at a time when it would have grave impacts on voting accessibility,” White wrote in her memo. “This is a great disservice to voters.”

Miami-Dade voters who would be most immediately impacted by Baxley’s bill are the 107,000 total voters in the cities of Virginia Gardens, Homestead, Hialeah, Miami, and Miami Beach who have already requested mail ballots for municipal elections that fall between September and November.

On Tuesday, Miami-Dade commissioners approved an amended resolution by Commissioner Raquel Regalado opposing the bill, which Regalado said would “create havoc in upcoming local elections.”

In Hialeah, about 25,000 voters would have to request their mail ballots again by late October ahead of the city’s Nov. 2 election, which includes a critical vote to replace term-limited Mayor Carlos Hernández. Three city council seats are also on the ballot.

“You will have people that voted in the last election that will probably not be voting in the upcoming election,” Hernández, a Republican who has been critical of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, told the Miami Herald. “I don’t know what the agenda is behind this. It’s Tallahassee politics and I’m not a Tallahassee politician.”

Paul Hernandez, a Hialeah councilman who recently switched his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat, also blasted the proposal.

“Once again, we’re seeing the disastrous effects on local government that are a product of poorly thought-out Tallahassee Republican legislation,” he said. “To think that there might be people who are expecting to receive their ballot and won’t, that’s concerning, especially in this election.”

Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, a former Democratic state lawmaker, said the bill is “clearly intended to reduce” voter turnout.

“It’s terrible,” Gelber said. “We’ve had no issues with elections. What are we fixing?”

If approved, the bill would nullify more than 15,700 current vote-by-mail ballot requests made by Beach voters ahead of a November election in which three commission seats and the mayor’s seat are up for grabs. Less than 35,000 residents voted in last November’s city election.

“Anything we can do to make it easier for people to vote makes all the sense in the world,” Gelber said. “Voting shouldn’t be a hardship, it should be convenient.”

In Homestead, where four seats are up for election in October, 561 voters would have to request their ballots again.

Mayor Steven Losner, who is running to keep his seat, agrees with Baxley that the voter rolls should be cleaned up. However, he thinks there may be a better way to achieve that instead of having all voters start from scratch, like spending the money to contact voters on the standing mail ballot list.

“It’s a function of having enough money to do the outreach,” said Losner, a Republican.

Another 396 mail ballot requests by Virginia Gardens residents would be wiped out before the city’s Sept. 3 election. More than 58,000 voters in Miami, which has an election for mayor and commissioners on Nov. 2, would also have to request new mail ballots if they want to vote by mail.

Baxley’s bill would also have a financial impact on the county. According to White, Miami-Dade’s elections department spends $70,000 annually sending renewal notices to voters whose mail ballot requests have expired. If that effort has to be adjusted to include the 400,000 existing mail ballot voters whose status would expire sooner, the change would cost the county approximately $405,000 in printing, postage and temporary staffing, White said.

The bill, which has passed through its first of three committee stops on a party-line vote, doesn’t propose any increase in funding. Supervisors are likely to incur additional processing costs, the bill’s staff analysis found.

“The concern is supervisors would have to get out so much information,” said Boca Raton Democratic Sen. Tina Polsky, who filed an amendment that would undo the time element for mail ballot requests. Her amendment failed.

“I know what went into getting that many people signed up, how hard campaigns and both parties worked,” she said. “They went through all the work to get these people registered, you have to do it every year.”

Herald staff writers Douglas Hanks, Aaron Leibowitz and Martin Vassolo contributed to this report.