Lies and garbage? FL election supervisors face challengers who question 2020 presidential results

At a press event in front of the Pinellas County Courthouse last month, dozens of activists gathered to hear presentations from a handful of insurgent GOP challengers running for supervisor of elections in counties throughout Florida. They held signs such as, “Hand Count All Ballots, “Must be a Citizen to Vote,” “No More Absentee Ballots” and “Clean the Voter Rolls.”

“Our leaders in Tallahassee proclaim Florida is the gold standard of elections,” said candidate Dave Schaffel, running in a race in Collier County. “Nonsense! We’re being gaslit. Far too many of our election standards are substandard. And others aren’t enforced or acted upon by our supervisors of elections.”

Another GOP challenger, George Umansky, mentioned how Democrat Gertrude Walker has been leading the St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections office for nearly 44 years, having first been appointed to the position in 1980 by then-Gov. Bob Graham and re-elected 11 times since.

“You heard that right. Forty-four years. Far too long for any constitutional officer,” he said.

Historically, supervisors of elections have been among the least challenged offices when it comes time for voting every four years. But this year, organized conservative opposition has been sprouting up and confronting the status quo in offices of supervisors of elections. Meanwhile, some supervisors have had to fight off baseless allegations, disinformation, and questionable assertions made by the candidates.

Five of those insurgent challengers spoke at the press event last month in April, while two others had surrogates outlining their platforms.

Currently, 37 incumbent supervisors of elections are running without an opponent in 2024.

Allegations of dis-and misinformation 

In his campaign website, Billy Christensen describes himself as “a dedicated husband, proud father, Christian, and a true American patriot who has served our nation in various capacities.”

He is challenging 12-year-incumbent Democratic Supervisor of Elections Craig Latimer in Hillsborough County. Christensen said at the press event last month that he had “personally witnessed concerning security threats” in Hillsborough County’s election office, “including exposed WiFi server and modem data connected to voting tabulators and unattended and unaccountable flash drives that contain sensitive voter data.”

Latimer counters that Christiansen doesn’t know what he’s talking about and labeled the criticism as being “part of the mis, dis- and mal information playbook that my colleagues and I have been confronting for years now.”

“Mr. Christensen and others seem intent on using truly baseless allegations to undermine the public’s confidence in elections,” Latimer told the Phoenix in an email message. “The flash drives he refers to are a critical component in ensuring the security of our tabulation process. Those drives — which did not contain any sensitive voter data — were used to download Logic & Accuracy test files from our air-gapped election server, so that the files could be exported to the Division of Elections, as required by the Department of State. I wish I could say that Mr. Christensen’s misguided allegation is due to his lack of knowledge — but my office provided this information to him in response to his public records request so there really is no excuse for making this false and misleading claim.”

In Lake County in Central Florida, Republican Alan Hays has served as Supervisor of Elections since 2016. He’s now being challenged by Tom Vail, the first vice chair of the Lake County Republican Party who came up 400 votes short in a bid to win the State House District 25 seat in 2022. Vail was previously listed as a registered agent at Amy’s Orchids LLC, according to state records.

Vail has castigated Hays for his part in writing up a one-page document of legislative priorities for the 2024 legislative session from the Florida Supervisors of Elections (FSE) organization that included six specific requests, included calling for legislation protecting election workers from harassment and threats, exempting election worker information from public record requests and exempting election workers from having to be screened by E-Verify (those requests when unaddressed during the past session).

“They (FSE) wanted to enact a statute with a felon penalty for intimidation or harassment of election workers,” Vail said. “To me, this was clearly intended to threaten or censor anyone who questions elections outcomes or processes.” Vail added that “citizen volunteers” in Lake County “have made multiple records requests about voter rolls, undeliverable election mail, and election processes. And have been met with various forms of resistance from the current supervisor of elections.”

Hays heard about Vail apparently distributing an alternative printed version of the legislative priorities, which he refers to as a “legislative agenda sheet.”

“When I became aware of it, I went to him personally man to man, and told him the garbage that he has on the back of that legislative agenda sheet is full of lies,” Hays told the Phoenix in an email.

“He continues to lie about that legislative committee work and the Florida association of supervisors. Any reasonable person who read his garbage would recognize how absurd it is. But yet he keeps on parading the same garbage.”

Vail responded by saying that that Hays hasn’t proven that anything that he’s said is an actual lie, and that his analysis is one of opinion and interpretation. “All those six points on the legislative agenda look suspicious to me,” Vail adds.

Election denying

The seven challengers from the press event in April are running explicitly on questioning the veracity of the 2020 presidential election, such as Schaffel, who is currently running a digital campaign ad that begins with an ominous soundtrack and a black-and-white photograph of the White House. Schaffel has called himself a “40-year IT professional,” yet lists none of his professional credentials on his website.

“Was our presidential election stolen?” a narrator says dramatically in the ad. “American voters deserve to know the truth. The machines – can they be trusted? Mail-in ballots. Were they all really legitimate? Joe Biden. Did he deserve to be president?”

These candidates represent a significant portion of Republican voters who “continue to express distrust in the integrity of American elections,” writes University of South Florida associate professor Stephen Neely and Savannah Havird, a graduate assistant and research assistant at the USF School of Public Affairs, in a recent opinion piece written for the Tampa Bay Times. That distrust stems from the belief that Donald Trump, and not Joe Biden, was the winner of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

A survey of 1,500 Americans nationwide conducted by the Florida Center for Cybersecurity at USF that was published in January found that 54% of Republican voters don’t believe that Biden won the election, and 54% of registered Republicans also said they are either “not very” or “not at all confident” that the 2024 election will be conducted fairly. A CNN/SSRS survey from last summer showed that 69% of Republicans and Republican-leaners said Joe Biden’s win was not legitimate.

In Florida, where Trump defeated by Biden by more than three percentage points in 2020, top GOP officials immediately hailed the success of that election, but then went ahead and passed major election reform bills that imposed new restrictions on voter access in 2021, 2022 and 2023 that in turn prompted various voting and civil rights groups to sue the state, saying that such restrictions were a form of “voter suppression.”

But to some of the conservative activists running this year, those reforms haven’t gone nearly far enough.

‘Rumors are not facts’

Ion Sancho served as the Leon County Supervisor of Elections for 28 years, from 1989 to 2017. He believes that these conservative voting activists who are quick to criticize the system aren’t as well informed as they should be.

“These individuals don’t have a clue,” he says, particularly of criticisms of Florida’s vote-by-mail process.

“Most of their charges are really not supported by evidence, which is why [Former] Secretary of State Laurel Lee, [Current Sec. of State] Cord Byrd, these state attorneys — when you can’t bring evidence, your charges are not going to be deemed credible. As President Trump found out in 61 out of 62 court cases that he tried to bring in. Rumors are not facts. These individuals deal in rumors, fiction and quite frankly, they’ve deluded themselves, based primarily on Donald Trump’s lies to the American people.”

Criticism of election officials and workers has reached the stage where 38% of them have reported experiencing threats, harassment or abuse, according to a Brennan Center for Justice report of more than 900 election officials published last week.

But there have been documented problems at local Supervisors of Elections offices that the GOP challengers are bringing up.

Umansky, the Republican running in St. Lucie County against Democrat Gertrude Walker, noted how she had been cited in a “scathing report” about vote counting problems produced by the Florida Department of State after the 2012 elections.

The Department of State said in that report that “[d]espite well intentioned efforts, staff inexperience, and inadequate procedures compounded issues, resulting in additional technical and procedural errors.” It went on to state that observers from the Department of State determined that “there were at least four separate incidences of memory card failures, a number of ballot scanning errors during retabulation and an early voting recount, missing logs for ballot accounting, and incomplete official results.”

Walker did not respond to the Phoenix’s request for comment. But Sancho acknowledges that office had issues in 2012.

“There was problems in St. Lucie County — I’m aware of that because we were one of the individuals who came to their rescue,” he told the Phoenix. “The early vote tabulation was not correct. They had to refeed every ballot over again to get correct numbers, which they did.”

In addition to the five candidates and two candidate surrogates who spoke at the Pinellas press event last month declaring their candidacies for office, there could be more challengers. The deadline for candidates to qualify for supervisor of elections ends on June 14.

As of May 7, here is the electoral situation in all 67 Florida counties:

GOP incumbents running unopposed (34)

Baker: Chris Milton

Bay: Mark Andersen to be replaced by Nina Ward (appointed by DeSantis in 2024- effective June 8)

Bradford: Amanda Seyfang

Calhoun: Sharon Chason

Clay: Chris Chambless

Columbia: Tomi S. Brown

Flagler: Kaiti Lenhart

Glades: Aletris Farnam

Gulf:  John M. Hanlon

Hamilton: Laura Hutto

Hendry: Sherry Taylor

Highlands: Karen Healy (appointed by DeSantis in 2021)

Holmes: Rusty Williams

Indian River: Leslie Rossway Swan

Jackson : Carol A. Dunaway

Jefferson: Michelle Milligan

Lafayette: Travis Hart

Lee: Tommy Doyle

Levy: Tammy Jones

Liberty: Grant Conyers

Marion: Wesley Wilcox

Martin: Vicki Davis

Pasco: Brian Corley

Pinellas: Julie Marcus

Okaloosa :Paul Lux

Okeechobee: Melissa Arnold

Putnam: Charles L Overturf III

St. Johns: Vicky Oakes

Sarasota:  Ron Turner

Sumter: Bill Keen

Suwanee:  Jennifer Kinsey

Union: Deborah K Osborne

Volusia: Lisa Lewis

Wakulla:  Joe Morgan

Democratic incumbents running unopposed (1)

Leon: Mark Earley

NPA incumbents running unopposed (2)

Franklin: Heather C Riley

Taylor: Dana Southerland

NPA incumbents being challenged (1)

Polk: Lori Edwards

Open seats: (8)

DeSoto:

Dixie:

Gadsden:

Gilchrist:

Orange:

Hernando:

Miami-Dade:

Monroe:

Competitive races: (18)

Alachua: Democratic incumbent Kim Barton vs. Republican Judith Jensen

Brevard: GOP incumbent  Tim Bobanic vs. Republican challenger John Joseph Tobia

Broward: Dem incumbent Joe Scott vs. Dem challenger Russell Bathulia

Charlotte: GOP incumbent Leah Valenti vs. Republican David Kalin Jr.

Citrus: GOP incumbent Maureen Baird vs. Republican Tiffany Long

Collier: GOP incumbent Melissa Blazier (appointed by DeSantis in 2023) vs. two Republicans — David Schaffel and Tim Guerette

Escambia: GOP incumbent Robert Bender vs. Democratic challenger Carrie Young and Libertarian Stan McDaniels

Hillsborough: Democratic incumbent Craig Latimer vs. GOP challenger Billy Christensen

Hardee: Democratic incumbent Diane Smith vs Jessica Ussery DeFoor

Lake: Republican incumbent Alan Hays challenged by Republican Tom Vail

Madison: Republican incumbent Heath Driggers vs. Democratic challenger Donnell Davis

Manatee: Republican James Satcher (appointed by Ron DeSantis in 2024) challenged by Republican Scott Farrington

Nassau: Republican Janet Adkins vs Republican Stan Bethea

Osceola: Democrat Mary Jane Arrington vs. Republican Jim Trautz, Jr.

Santa Rosa: GOP incumbent Tappie Villane vs. Republican Cindy M. Hall

Seminole: GOP incumbent Chris Anderson challenged by Republican Amy Pennock and Democrat Deborah Poulalion

St. Lucie: Democratic incumbent Gertrude Walker challenged by Republicans George Umansky and Jennifer C. Frey

Washington: Republican incumbent Deidra Pettis vs. Republican Cara Griffin Steele

SEPARATE: (1)

Duval: Republican incumbent Jerry Holland was elected in 2023

NOT LISTED: (2)

Walton and Palm Beach counties.