A new law wipes out standing AB requests every two years

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Early voting starts Monday — and so does the policing.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle announced on Thursday that she would activate the Elections Response Team and Voter Protection Hotline to ensure that early voting sites remain free of any impropriety or illegal activity.

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Almost 100,000 absentee ballots will be mailed Tuesday to voters in three of the bigger cities of Miami-Dade: Miami, Miami Beach and Hialeah.

Election Day is Nov. 2 but local races have seen a growing number of vote-by-mail ballots every year and these have become crucial to all campaigns. Increasingly, the race is over by the time the ABs are counted.

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A Florida Senate bill “moving at the speed of light” would purge the permanent vote-by-mail request lists in every county by July — and could disenfranchise close to 100,000 Miami-Dade voters with elections this year in Virginia Gardens, Homestead, Miami, Miami Beach and Hialeah.

Not so fast, said the Miami-Dade Commission, which on Tuesday passed a resolution, sponsored by Commissioner Raquel Regalado, opposing SB90 and urging the legislature to — at the very least — change the effective date to Jan. 1, 2022.

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If ever there was a race where absentee ballots was going to make the deciding factor, it is the special shotgun wedding election in Miami-Dade’s County District 5.
Four candidates are vying to replace Bruno Barreiro, who resigned last month so he could run for Congress: His wife, Zoraida Barreiro, former Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla, radio show host and former Telenovela star Carlos Gorin and Democrat activist and dark horse contender Eileen Higgins.
Election Day is on Tuesday, but it’s possible that the winner has already been decided.
As of Wednesday, there had been 6,703 ABs returned to the elections office, which is almost 30% of the 22,388 that went out. By the end of the day Friday, it will likely have surpassed the 7,088 that were returned during the last big contest in that district: 2012’s challenge to Barreiro by former State Rep. Luis Garcia. It’s only 385 ABs short. On Wednesday alone, 382 came in.
Read related: Miami-Dade special District 5 election is really a race for No. 2 on Tuesday
Sure, the Garcia vs Barreiro bout was a presidential primary and this is a shotgun wedding special election in a non presidential year that some people still don’t know is happening. But it’s the closest thing we could find to compare. There were two other nobodies running in that race, too, forcing the runoff after Barreiro failed to get 50%, even though he led ABs by about 1,500, a margin he was able to keep in the general, when it did make the difference in a 52-48 split.
In that first round in 2012, Barreiro got 3,784 absentee votes. Those are the ones that his wife — who only captured 676 ABs in the city District 3 election last year — is going after.
That same August in 2012, Alex DLP beat Zory’s brother-in-law, former State Rep. Gus Barreiro, in the Republican primary for State House 114 with 59% of the vote. In that first round, ADLP got 2,145 ABs.
You do the math.
Every campaign is going after those ABs hard. Barreiro told Ladra that voters have called her to report that people had already tried some shenanigans in Section 8 housing — hotbeds of absentee ballots, like fishing in a barrel.
Hopefully, the authorities are looking at these numbers, too, and have people in place to catch any fraud or intimidation.
 

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