Florida’s elections supervisors are asking the Legislature to protect poll workers and elections staff from public records requests that could expose them to threats, harassment or coercion. The proposal comes as distrust surrounding elections builds.
Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley says he’s received troubling public records requests for the personal information of staff and volunteers… and that he’s not the only one. He’s afraid with next year’s presidential election, it’ll get worse.
“The way this election cycle is ramping up, there’s a lot of …I don’t know, animosity. Distrust," he said. "People aren’t watching their Ps and Qs anymore. And it’s very unnerving, for poll workers especially.”
He’s worried about the targeting of poll workers and elections staff. Across the country, more than a dozen elections workers have faced death threats. Earley says having their names, addresses and political parties placed online could be dangerous.
“Two weeks ago, we received a very worrisome public records request for the names and positions and parties of all of our poll workers. If that is placed on the internet, we’re very concerned," he said. "We’ve been successful at pushing back against that, but I think the protections there are tenuous at best.”
Earley says that so far, elections officials have been able to protect much of the poll workers’ personal information due to their access to passwords, election software and other highly technical matters.
“And so, they’re entrusted with secrets that make our critical infrastructure and information technology work and keep them secure," he said. "So, we’ve been able to protect them under that realm of law and exemptions from public records requests. But frankly, that’s a bit tenuous. And we want a very explicit protection.”
He says it’s getting harder to keep poll workers, who are volunteers.
“It could make them vulnerable to being approached before an election, and somebody’s threatening them and saying, ‘If you don’t do something bad at the polling places, then we’ll do something bad to you.’ And it makes them vulnerable to coercion.”
Barbara Petersen, executive director of the Florida Center for Government Accountability, is an expert on the state’s open records laws. While she typically opposes records exemptions because they could lead to a reduction in government transparency and accountability, she says Earley’s proposal could be legitimate to protect the information of poll workers and election staff.
“It could be, yes, because we all know what happened to many of these people and the threats they got," she said. "Some of them – their lives were ruined because of those threats.”
Petersen says she’d need to see the bill language to be sure, but...
“Yes, we want to protect them," she said. "And the poll workers – so many of them are volunteers. But we need to make sure that we have access to the information that can assure these people are not patsies for a political party.”
The supervisors are also asking to exempt all voter information from public records requests. Here’s Earley again:
“Our voter records are being mined and being placed out on the internet," he said. "And folks that are being stalked and things like that, they’re being charged money to take their names off of these lists, and we’ve got a lot of concerns from our voters for that.”
But Petersen says the proposal would put average citizens at a disadvantage because the information would still be available to the voter, a canvassing board, an election official, a political party, or a qualified candidate facing opposition.
“That means that the people with the power get to have access to that critically important information," she said. "And it totally shuts out the citizen action groups, the grassroots organizations who might want to have access to that information to say ‘Hey, wait a minute! No! What this candidate is proposing is wrong.’”
Earley says Florida’s elections supervisors are on board with these legislative requests – either unanimously or nearly so. In particular, they’re concerned about losing poll workers, without whom they cannot run an election. He also says many supervisors are retiring earlier than one would expect.
Florida’s presidential preference primary is March 19th, 2024.
