Expert: Florida's Election Reforms Harm Disadvantaged Voters But Don't Fix Voting Fraud

Florida Phoenix

February 8, 2022

Last year’s elections reforms have erected barriers to voting for disadvantaged people in Florida while doing nothing to bolster election integrity — the purported reason for the law — an elections expert testified on Tuesday.

Michael Herron, chair of the Program in Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College, said Senate Bill 90, the law at issue, likely will depress voting by Blacks, Hispanics, older and disabled Floridians, and the poor by making it more difficult for third-party voter registration drives to operate and by requiring voters to request vote by mail ballots every two years, rather than every four, among other new restrictions.

The League of Women Voters of Florida, which seeks in federal court to have SB 90 overturned, is one such third party that regularly hosts voter-registration drives.

As a witness in that trial, Herron was asked about statements Republican sponsors in the House and Senate made in support of SB 90. For example, according to a legislative transcript, state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia said: “When we look at vote by mail ballots, there are almost no safeguards.”

“The statement is false,” Herron said. “There are safeguards for vote by mail voting in Florida. These include the safeguards around voter registration and use of security envelopes to cast ballots.”

In the Senate, bill sponsor Dennis Baxley said in debate: “I truly believe we will have a more secure process when people can decide each year what manner in which they would like to vote.”

“There is no basis in the literature on election administration to support the suggestion that elections are more secure when people have to decide more frequently when they want to vote, no,” Herron said.

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee is presiding via Zoom over the lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters and other voting- and civil-rights organizations seeking to overturn SB 90, approved by the 2021 Legislature at the urging of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

They insist the law makes voter-registration drives, voting by mail through mailboxes or ballot drop boxes, and rendering basic assistance to voters in line more difficult, allegedly resulting in voting suppression.

Attorney General Ashley Moody, with support from the state and national Republican Party, is defending the law. Although Florida’s county supervisors of elections are named defendants, because they would have to enforce it, their organization came out against the legislation while it was pending.

Herron testified to a major shift toward voting by mail during 2020 because of COVID-19, with 4.9 million votes cast that way compared to 2.8 million in 2016. Making it more difficult to vote by mail will affect all those voters and more, he said.

“If vote-by-mail voters vote in person, then they risk causing congestion in polling places,” he said.

Traditionally, Republicans had favored that way of voting more than Democrats, but that “flipped” during 2020. That was true among multiple demographic groups, including age groups and minorities.

The new law will burden older voters, Democrats, and minority voters to the extent they wish to vote by mail rather than voting in person, he said.

Herron said he has testified in a number of the lawsuits alleging voter fraud during the 2020 elections and that those cases produced no evidence of fraud.

As for whether voting by mail is especially susceptible to fraud, as Republicans including DeSantis have alleged, Herron insisted there’s no evidence to support that.

He pointed to states including Oregon and Washington, which have long relied on voting by mail almost exclusively, and Montana, which switched to voting by mail between the primary and general elections in 2020. None of these states has reported widespread fraud, he said.

There is no evidence Florida represents an outlier for fraud compared to other states, Herron said.

Florida’s supervisors of elections, meanwhile, reported suspected incidents of double voting in 11 counties that might be explained by administrative errors. SB 90 doesn’t address that, Herron said. The supervisors reported no problems involving drop boxes — whose use is severely curtailed under SB 90.

“Are you aware of any evidence that leads you to believe that there was systematic voter fraud in Florida in 2020?” plaintiffs lawyer Lali Madduri asked.

“No. No evidence,” Herron said.

“Are you aware of any evidence that leads you to believe that a fraudulent vote was counted in Florida in 2020 that could have been prevented by SB 90?”

“No. No evidence,” he repeated.

He also cited statements by Secretary of State Laurel Lee and Sen. Baxley attesting to the security of the 2020 voting, the latter saying it had “very high credibility.”

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