Republicans, voting in a closed primary this month, are choosing the next Lake County supervisor of elections.
Incumbent Alan Hays, a Republican former state representative and senator, has had the job since 2016. He says Florida is the "gold standard" in election administration.
Challenger Tom Vail is an activist for "election integrity" and first vice president with the Lake County Republican Party. Vail is pushing for major changes in the election process.
Those changes -- if approved by lawmakers -- would have a huge impact on voters.
'Not a Satanic Globalist'
Vail has signs all over his gold Cadillac SUV that let you know exactly who he is: "Christian Nationalist -- Not a Satanic Globalist." And they advertise his political platform: "One Day Voting," "Hand Count Ballots," "Limit Absentee Ballots."
It's an agenda fueled by allegations of fraud after the 2020 election, which former President Donald Trump falsely claimed was rigged.
The nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice -- which researches election security -- says voter fraud is rare in today's elections.
But that’s not how Vail sees it.
"There’s voter fraud all the time," he said. "There's election fraud all the time."
Florida law has a list maintenance process, relying on official sources, to find and remove registered voters who moved away or died.
Vail, who said he personally checked some addressses, believes inaccuracies in those lists of registered voters create opportunities to cheat.
His campaign website says "suggestions for removal of ineligible voter registrations should be taken seriously and investigated fully."
He and a local group focused on election integrity have peppered Supervisor of Elections Hays with those concerns and other allegations. In campaign literature, Vail claims Florida law has been controlled by leftist organizations to open "multiple doors” to voter fraud.
Hays said their claims are false and show a misunderstanding of the election process.
"[F]or the last three and a half years," Hays said, "we've been having all kinds of headwinds ... harassment, basically, from a group that we have labeled wackadoodles."
Lake County elections are secure and "in 100% percent compliance" with every statute, Hays said. "To me, the biggest tragedy of the 2020 election is not who won or who lost. ... The biggest tragedy is the millions of Americans whose confidence in our election system has been undermined by this group of people that are running across the country telling lies about the 2020 election."
Limiting opportunities to vote
So how would Vail’s proposals affect voters? For one thing, they would dramatically limit the opportunity to vote. Take, for example, his plan for one-day voting.
"The point is it's more secure, it's more reliable, it's more trustworthy," Vail said. "And yes, the election season makes it more possible for people to game the system."
He acknowledges it could create long lines. So Vail says add more polling places -- and change your mindset.
"Many times I’ve waited in lines," he said. "And people wait all the time. And saying we can't wait in line to vote -- voting for our government, for our elected officials, it’s one of the most important things you do."
Hays, on the other hand, argued that if you want full citizen participation, one-day voting is ridiculous, "but if you want to restrict the number of people who will vote, perhaps one-day voting would be your cup of tea."
Vail does have an issue with neighbors encouraging "a guy who doesn't really care about voting" to get registered and then helping that person fill out their ballot. Though legal, he said, that's akin to "ballot harvesting."
"I'm 100% in favor of helping anybody that wants to vote to vote," Vail said, "but I'm 100% against any any kind of pressure to get somebody to vote" -- unless it's a parent encouraging their child.
A veteran perspective
There are practical challenges to canceling early voting and restricting mail-in ballots. That's according to Susan Gill, who served 20 years, until 2020, as Citrus County’s Republican supervisor of elections. The Legislature would have to do that -- and voters just wouldn't stand for it.
"Because our experience," she said, "is that voters really like early voting and vote by mail."
They like the convenience and the time to research the candidates and issues, she said. "I know, in Citrus County, we had like a third, a third, a third, which means two thirds of the people, two thirds of the voters wanted to vote prior to Election Day."
Gill said there are hurdles also to counting votes by hand: you’ll need a lot more staff, you’ll lose accuracy and it’ll take forever.
Among many precautions, state law requires logic and accuracy tests on voting systems beforehand along with post-election audits, Gill said. "We supervisors, knowing what we know on this whole thing, we're very confident that, absolutely, the machine count is the best count."
She said that, since problems with the 2000 Bush-Gore election, Florida has reformed its election system and is the standard for the rest of the country.
As for counting votes by hand, Vail said he has a plan. He would do the machine tabulation required by law but would also have teams of four people working together under video surveillance to count the votes again on all the ballots, which in the last presidential election were more than 200,000 in Lake County.
"There is a money issue involved, no doubt about it," he said. "But I think we can do a lot of it with unpaid volunteers, too."
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