LAKELAND, Fla.—Florida’s Alachua County school board in 2020-21 repeatedly tangled with Gov. Ron DeSantis in a bitter battle over local school board autonomy versus the state’s preemptive authority in managing responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It was one of two Florida school boards—along with Broward County’s—where members’ salaries were docked by the state and the districts fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for imposing mask mandates, in defiance of a DeSantis executive order and a state Department of Health rule that banned such actions.
While the fines were rescinded in court rulings, the Alachua board’s actions sparked controversy, which invited scrutiny. One of its five members was removed by DeSantis because she lived outside her district. His appointee, Mildred Russell, then cast the deciding vote when the board fired Alachua School Superintendent Carlee Simon.
With four Alachua board seats on the Aug. 23 ballot—two open seats and two incumbents, including the governor’s appointee—area Republicans seized on the parents’ rights movement, hoping to generate enthusiasm in support of three conservative candidates and Russell.
DeSantis has certainly been riding parents’ anger over pandemic mask mandates and critical race theory. For the first time ever, a Florida governor formally issued endorsements in non-partisan local elections, backing 30 candidates in 19 school districts and campaigning on behalf of several before the Aug. 23 elections.
Among those 30: Russell, who was being challenged by Diyonne McGraw, who she had replaced on the board after McGraw’s home was found to be 328 feet outside the district she was elected to serve in 2020.
But enthusiasm among Republican voters can only be so efficacious in Alachua County, where the University of Florida dominates its largest city, Gainesville. It’s one of just 15 of Florida’s 67 counties where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans—and, in this case, significantly so.
According to the Florida Secretary of State’s office, as of Aug. 23, of Alachua County’s 179,389 registered voters, 85,920 are Democrats and 48,362 Republicans.
In the best of circumstances, it would take nearly all of Alachua’s 42,093 unaffiliated voters and the entire GOP registry to defeat Democratic candidates in the deep blue county, where only the most western of its 64 precincts have Republican majorities.
But what unfolded in Alachua County before the election, and on Aug. 23 itself, can hardly be described as the best of circumstances.
Voter Suppression?
It can be—and is being—described, however, as voter suppression by some local Republicans, with county GOP representatives calling on the state Republican Party Committee and DeSantis to investigate Alachua Supervisor of Elections (SOE) Kim Barton’s actions, either for rank incompetence or conspiring to sabotage Republicans at the polls.
Voters in two west county precincts, both where GOP voters hold sway, were forced to wait more than a half-hour to vote on election night because their polling stations ran out of Republican ballots.
In fact, GOP voters in the Newberry and High Springs precinct polling sites had to wait for SOE workers to twice resupply depleted Republican ballots on Election Day, witnesses have widely reported.
With Republican ballots in at least two precincts hard to find, the SOE’s website, VoteAlachua.com, then crashed. As a result, several precincts had to transport ballots to the SOE’s office to be tabulated manually hours after the vast majority of Florida counties had filed official results.
When the results were posted, incumbent Tina Certain was reelected with progressives Sarah Rockwell and Kay Abbitt winning their races, and McGraw reclaiming her seat by defeating Russell, one of only five of DeSantis’ 30 endorsements not to advance.
The five members of the new Alachua County School Board are, for the first time ever, all women with each regarded as progressive. Defeating three conservative male opponents and Russell on Aug. 23 has Democrats calling it a tide-turner in their party’s 2022 prospects in Florida.
It also has local Republicans furious, with state Sen. Keith Perry (R-Gainesville) saying intentional or not, by its incompetence, Barton’s office is guilty of “voter suppression.”
“Republican voters in both Newberry and High Springs have given up waiting and left without exercising their right to vote because Republican ballots were unavailable,” he said in an election night statement.
“It is unconscionable that elections officials have put the integrity of these races in jeopardy, forcing voters to make a choice between waiting to cast their ballots and getting home to their families. At stake are local races, including several competitive school board races.”
Perry said at that point, it was uncertain what options that the county’s Republican voters had in ensuring their votes were counted or in casting a ballot if the SOE’s mistakes made it impossible for them to vote.
“What we know for an absolute fact is Republican votes have been suppressed while all other voters have had the unimpeded opportunity to exercise their right to vote,” he said. “There’s somebody and some person that was the cause of this. That individual or group of individuals need to be held accountable.”
Barton, a two-term Democrat who was first elected Alachua County SOE in 2016, was already facing criticism after her office in July mailed nearly 1,000 ballots without any Gainesville City Commission races to voters in one precinct, and 900 ballots to voters in another with an incorrect Florida House district.
Barton’s SOE office was also investigated by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) for allegedly recruiting at least 10 inmates at the county jail to register to vote following the adoption of 2019’s Amendment 4, which gave some Florida felons the right to vote. Four of the 10 have been convicted of illegally registering to vote because they lied on their statements. No one in the Alachua SOE was charged.
