Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link has a challenger who filed a federal lawsuit arguing how ballots should be counted.
Republican Jeffrey Buongiorno subscribes to the fantasy that millions of immigrants are surging into the country illegally to vote Kamala Harris into the Oval Office. “Avoid a civil war by filing a civil complaint against the treasonous traitors who are conspiring to offset your vote,” he urged in a message on X.
There was a time when such conspiracy-wielding candidates were laughed off as unelectable. No more. After all, millions of Floridians will cast ballots for the biggest election conspiracy theorist of them all in November.
In 2020, there was just one election conspiracy. Now there are dozens, and across the state, election conspiracy theorists like Buongiorno are on the ballot or jostling to influence whose vote counts.
Take Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, who’s in charge of Florida elections.
Just as Mrs. Samuel Alito’s flags suggested what kind of political talk took place behind closed doors, Byrd’s wife Esther’s post-Jan. 6 Facebook posts warn of “coming civil wars.”
“There are only 2 teams,” she wrote. “With Us [or] Against Us.”
Conspiracy theories
A figure of speech, Cord Byrd said when asked about the posts, before he bowed to another conspiracy theory and withdrew the state from a multi-state compact ensuring the accuracy of voter rolls. The Electronic Information Registration Center (ERIC), can find voter fraud. But someone floated a George Soros conspiracy, Donald Trump chimed in, and Florida was left without a one-of-a-kind tool to find duplicate voter registrations.
Then there’s Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody. Because nothing says election integrity like pressuring another state to ditch its votes, Moody joined 16 other states petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to jettison ballots in four swing states in 2020. It took all of 48 hours for the court to turn away the poor-loser arguments. Moody’s own lawyers had already derided the case as “bat-s–t insane” and, in an especially prescient description, “weird.”
The same adjective equally applies to Buongiorno’s 36-page lawsuit. He hints that House Speaker Mike Johnson introduced an election bill in part because of Buongiorno’s analysis, alleges a Haitian couple once guaranteed him a congressional primary win for $85,000, and says a new local voting tabulation center “defies the will of the people.”
Assigned to a Trump judge
Buongiorno’s fact-free claim of mass non-citizen voting has traction from Mar-a-Lago on down. Nor can you shrug off the suit. The judge assigned to his case is Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee known for her novel legal decisions.
Further, Buongiorno is just one of several conspiracy-minded supervisor of election candidates who hope to oversee Florida votes, the Tampa Bay Times found. In Charlotte County, David Kalin told reporters his radio frequency analyzer proved 99.9% of Florida’s ballot machines are connected to a modem. Lake County GOP candidate Tom Vail’s website declares that “Easy to Vote Means Easy to Cheat.”
Then there’s EagleAI, a software system backed by Cleta Mitchell, best known for being on the call when then-President Trump asked Georgia’s Secretary of State to find another 11,780 votes.
In May, EagleAI dumped the names of 10,000 Florida voters on Cord Byrd’s doorstep, alleging they might be illegally registered.
Such name dumps are cutting-edge voter suppression. A voter can only hope that their registration is not being challenged, and if it is, that underfunded and overworked supervisors of elections get around to combing through all 10,000 names before election day.
It’s the sort of thing ERIC would have accomplished, only with access to confidential detail that can distinguish between glitches and actual problems, such as a part-time Floridian registered in two states.
Solving actual problems is not the end goal of conspiracy theorists, though. Keeping people from voting is. Vail, for instance, believes that not everyone should be encouraged to register, the Orlando Sentinel reports. And one of Cord Byrd’s complaints about ERIC was its requirement that states send postcards urging people to register to vote. Floridians apparently don’t need extra nudges to participate in democracy, because the state is doing just fine, he said.
There really is an election fraud being perpetrated in Florida, one that voters need to pay attention to: It’s the clickbait fiction that the machinery of democracy is hopelessly rigged and is fixable only by limiting access to the ballot box. Plenty of people are lining up to do just that — if we let them.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
