Monique Worrell, the Democratic state attorney in Orlando who was suspended by DeSantis last year, won 57 percent of the vote, defeating incumbent Andrew Bain, a member of the conservative Federalist Society whom the governor had appointed to replace Worrell after accusing her of neglecting her duties as a prosecutor. 

“Tonight’s results underscore the resilience of our democracy and a powerful message from the people: No governor’s petty political maneuvers and no amount of dark money can silence the voices of thousands who demand a fair, smart approach to justice over the failed, outdated policies of the past,” Worrell said in a statement released by her campaign. “We’re bringing back a State Attorney who knows this role isn’t about racking up convictions but about pursuing justice without bending to a political agenda.” 

In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, Democrat Andrew Warren lost to incumbent Suzy Lopez, who was appointed by DeSantis in August 2022 after the governor removed Warren, arguing that he had also neglected his duties by vowing to not prosecute abortion cases and ending the aggressive prosecution of Black cyclists and pedestrians. Lopez won 53 percent of the vote.

In a statement, Warren defended his record and slammed the governor’s actions. “The best candidate doesn’t always win, especially when the other side cheats—illegally suspending you, then spending millions of dollars lying about you,” Warren said. “I hope Ms. Lopez grows into this role to become an effective and independent state attorney—not beholden to the governor or sheriff, but accountable to the people.”

Worrell and Warren had fought their suspensions in the courts, alleging that DeSantis overstepped his authority and removed them for political reasons. In August, the Florida Supreme Court, which is largely filled with DeSantis appointees, upheld the governor’s decision to remove Worrell by a vote of 6–1. Warren had found more success—two federal courts ruled that the governor’s conduct violated his First Amendment rights, but a decision by the federal appeals court hearing Warren’s case was stalled after DeSantis requested to argue his case in front of the full panel of judges. 

In the lead-up to Election Day, Warren and Worrell faced questions about whether DeSantis would ultimately remove them from office again and replace them with his appointees. In an interview with Bolts this summer, Warren acknowledged that he and other Democrats were being watched by DeSantis on the campaign trail. “Every Democratic candidate in Florida has to campaign under the threat of DeSantis removing them solely because they’re a Democrat, solely for political reasons,” he said. 

Ahead of the election, DeSantis would not commit to deferring to voters if they again elected Worrell and Warren, suggesting he might remove them again. 

“When both of those folks were in office, they took the position that they didn’t have to enforce laws they disagreed with that caused people to be put back on the street who then victimized folks that should not have been victimized,” DeSantis told reporters at a September press conference when asked about what he’d do if they won. 

Under state law, Florida’s governor has sweeping authority to suspend local elected officials for several reasons, such as neglect of duty, drunkenness, or malfeasance. Louis Virelli, a constitutional law professor at Stetson University, told Bolts there’s a high standard for neglect of duty, the reason for which DeSantis suspended Worrell and Warren, and it usually requires being able to show that someone won’t do their job, not just that they’ve established certain policies. Virelli, who would only speak about Warren’s case because he was not familiar with Worrell’s, said DeSantis’ removal of the prosecutor didn’t rise to that standard. 

“Honoring the outcome of elections is what makes us a democracy,” Virelli told Bolts. “There’s nothing else to a democracy. Either we get to choose our representatives and our elected officials, or we don’t, and if we don’t, we’re not a democracy anymore.”

Beyond ousting local elected prosecutors, DeSantis was also accused of meddling in Orlando’s race for state attorney. Thomas Feiter, a Republican who lost in the August primary, said in a lawsuit last month that DeSantis’ team tried to bribe him to drop out of the race and help clear the way for Bain, who ran as an independent; the candidate who beat Feiter quickly dropped out of the race after winning the GOP primary. Feiter also wrote in a complaint to the Florida Bar Association that if Worrell won, DeSantis planned to remove her again and replace her with Bain. A local judge dismissed Feiter’s case last week on procedural grounds and the bar association did not follow up on the claim. 

“If Monique wins, I think—well, they told me that the plan is to remove her again, and just put Bain back in,” Feiter said in September on local radio channel WMNF. 

DeSantis did not respond to questions from Bolts about whether he plans to again remove prosecutors who were elected by voters. 

Residents in Tampa and Orlando quickly felt the impact of DeSantis’ removal of their elected state attorney. In Tampa, the governor’s appointee, Lopez, swiftly rolled back Warren’s policies. Warren had instructed line prosecutors to stop pursuing nonviolent, misdemeanor cases resulting from bicycle and pedestrian stops after a 2015 Tampa Bay Times investigation showing such police stops overwhelmingly targeted Black people. Within four days of her appointment in 2022, Lopez sent out a memo lifting restrictions on how her office handled bicycle and pedestrian stop cases. 

On Tuesday night, Yvette Lewis, president of the Hillsborough County NAACP, an organization that helped craft Warren’s policy, said she was disappointed with the results. “Not good for Black people,” she wrote in a text message. 

In Orlando, Worrell had campaigned on a platform to reform the criminal justice system. Among her goals was to tackle mass incarceration and cut down on the number of kids tried in adult court. Worrell was also the director of the conviction integrity unit under former State Attorney Aramis Ayala and had approved DNA testing for two capital cases through her own unit shortly after taking office.

This story was updated on Nov. 6 to include a statement from Worrell. 

The post Orlando Prosecutor Ousted by Governor Wins Her Job Back appeared first on Bolts.

Jeff Buongiorno, a slate member in Palm Beach County, has called elections in Florida “a conspiracy from the top down,” alleging that the state’s GOP leadership is enabling noncitizens to vote. Chris Gleason, the candidate in Pinellas County, has baselessly claimed that the local supervisor, Republican Julie Marcus, had made Pinellas “ground zero” of mail voter fraud.

The candidates hail from different corners of the state but many have held joint events and press conferences and they’ve appeared on podcasts as a group to air their grievances. “Every single one of them is running because they saw their local SOE not following election law properly or not maintaining their voting rolls, and they got really upset,” Cathi Chamberlain, who is loosely coordinating this coalition of 13 candidates and is the founder of Pinellas Watchdogs, a group that circulates fringe theories about fraud, said on a right-wing podcast in July.

The group hit a wall in Tuesday’s GOP primaries. 

Six of its members were defeated by incumbent Republican supervisors, including Gleason in Pinellas County. A seventh candidate trailed in his primary’s initial count.

But elsewhere in the state, six more coalition members, including Buongiorno, are advancing to the general election. They’ll continue their bid to take over supervisor offices into November. 

“Many of my colleagues have been worn down by the atmosphere we find ourselves in but it has only strengthened my resolve,” incumbent Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Craig Latimer, a Democrat who’ll face slate member Billy Christensen in the fall, told Bolts.

Christensen was unopposed in Hillsborough County’s Republican primary. He’s one of four slate members who moved to November with no intraparty competition, alongside the candidates in Alachua, Palm Beach, and Osceola counties. Alachua is staunchly blue. Hillsborough, Palm Beach, and Osceola all flipped from voting for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 to voting for Republican Ron DeSantis in 2022.

Two other coalition members moved forward after winning contested GOP primaries in Monroe County and Seminole County. Both will also face Democrats in November. 

Slate candidates lost, often by overwhelming margins, in Pinellas, Charlotte, Collier, Lake, Lee, and Santa Rosa counties. In St. Lucie County, a manual recount is expected to stretch into next week; it’ll decide whether coalition member George Umansky, who trailed by just two votes in the initial count out of roughly 25,000 cast, moves on to face Democratic Supervisor Gertrude Walker. (Editor’s note: The recount confirmed that Umansky lost the primary to Republican Jennifer Frey by four votes.)

“We are extremely concerned that people trying to shake the public’s trust in elections are seeking to run our elections,” said Brad Ashwell, the state director for All Voting is Local, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for marginalized communities to vote. 

“Voters saw through the lies and voted down a lot of these candidates,” Ashwell said of Tuesday’s results. “We are really hopeful the other candidates moving into the general see those losses and realize it is not a winning strategy.”

Supervisors of elections in Florida are responsible for running elections within their county; they oversee voter registration, design ballots, conduct voter outreach, and process mail ballots. 

They can’t unilaterally change election rules set by lawmakers and the secretary of state. So the slate’s candidates wouldn’t have the authority to execute the changes some of them are proposing, such as ending the use of voting machines or banning all mail voting. 

Still, Ashwell warned, county officials would have opportunities to upend the system. They may grow more aggressive in purging registered voters based on minor errors on their forms, rejecting more mail ballots based on technicalities, and using dodgy AI tools to chase down issues on voter rolls. A far-right group has been pressuring local election officials to purge voters based on lists generated by the tool Eagle AI, which scrubs voter rolls to identify inconsistencies with other public databases; the state’s top elections official encouraged local offices to “take action” based on those lists, but voting rights advocates warn that these lists are not reliable.

Counties also have a lot of discretion on how accessible to make voting—how many drop boxes to install, how long early voting locations are open. And some slate members signaled they’d curtail access. “‘Easy to Vote’ MEANS ‘Easy to Cheat,’” their candidate in Lake County, who lost on Tuesday, wrote on his website. 

No supervisor can single-handedly refuse to certify their county’s election results, but they all sit on the three-person body responsible for certification.

Some of the slate’s candidates have drawn support from prominent figures who support election denier networks, such as Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, and billionaire Richard Uihlein.

But not all thirteen candidates align on what took place in the 2020 election, and whether there’s widespread fraud within Florida—or only in the states that Trump lost. 

Several slate candidates have asserted without evidence that Florida officials are erasing tens of thousands of votes. Others like Sherri Hodies, who won an open GOP primary in Monroe County, home to Key West, have said they trust Florida but believe there are issues with the count in Michigan or Georgia, states where Trump has denied his 2020 losses. 

Meanwhile, Amy Pennock, the slate’s candidate in Seminole County, told the Miami Herald that she does not think the 2020 election was stolen.

Pennock, who did not respond to a request for comment, is the only slate candidate who beat an incumbent in Tuesday’s Republican primary. She ousted Chris Anderson, whose tenure involved major clashes with the county’s other GOP officials. Anderson, who is Black, said last year that he was encountering racial discrimination that was making it harder for him to do his job. And he accused members of the county commission of racism in a social media video. Anderson also faced a complaint this month for allegedly using his role as supervisor to boost his own campaign, but a judge tossed the claim after finding no evidence. 

Pennock, a conservative member of the county school board who last year proposed to review and restrict access to some books in public school libraries, will now face Democrat Deborah Poulalion in November.

Poulalion told Bolts that she worries that misinformation about election fraud could weaken the security and accessibility of Florida’s voting system. “One of the worst things that came out of 2020 was losing confidence in the integrity of the system,” she said. “I think the system is still working, but the lack of confidence in the system could lead to making changes that make the system less effective.” 

Since the 2020 election, DeSantis and Republican lawmakers extensively restricted Florida’s voting laws, ostensibly to boost voters’ confidence. They toughened voter ID requirements, made it harder to vote by mail, and have set up a new police force to investigate fraud.  

Lake County Supervisor of Elections Alan Hays, a Republican who defeated a slate candidate on Tuesday, told Bolts that he is satisfied by the result of his own primary. But he regrets that a lot of harm has already been done to the state’s voting systems.

“I certainly think it is a rebuke of the nonsense that has been spread,” he said of Tuesday’s results. “Unfortunately, we’ve had too many legislators already listen to the garbage that has been voiced by this side of the equation. That’s why some of the election laws have been modified the way they have.” 

Hays is part of the Florida Supervisors of Elections, a professional membership organization that lobbies state lawmakers on behalf of local elections officials. The organization has worked to dispel misinformation and fight proposals that risk jamming up the election process.  Hays, for instance, has spoken out against proposed legislation that would allow local officials to count votes by hand rather than use machines. This has become a rallying cry for conservatives who doubt election results, despite evidence that hand counting is error prone and expensive.

“Our association has been very active and we have been able to help craft the legislative changes so they are not as offensive as they would have been,” Hays told Bolts.

But Ashwell worries that, if more election deniers took over as local supervisors, they may use the association as a platform to advocate for statewide changes. 

“When we have more and more of these election denial candidates winning races, it changes the tenor of the association,” Ashwell said. “If they change the willingness of that association to weigh in on a bill to allow hand counts, then that could become standard in Florida.”

Christensen, the “America First” coalition’s candidate in Hillsborough County, told Bolts that he is eager to change the politics of the statewide association. He thinks the group has a thumb on the scale, and is weakening trust in elections by failing to address issues.

Picking up a key conservative grievance about the 2020 election, Christensen has blamed Latimer, the Democratic incumbent, for accepting a large grant to help run elections that year from a nonprofit organization with ties to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. These grants were distributed to thousands of election offices nationwide, but Trump-aligned conservatives have pointed to them to make unfounded claims that local election offices conducted inappropriate activities that year. 

Florida and dozens of other GOP-run states have banned private grants to election offices since 2020. Florida supervisors’ professional association successfully lobbied in 2021 to water down that legislation, fearing that it’d leave them cash-strapped and needing to cut crucial operations.

But Christensen also says it was a local issue, rather than presidential headlines, that led him to run for office. His family was affected by a data breach at the Hillsborough County supervisor of elections office; the county disclosed last year that a hacker accessed the driver’s licenses and social security numbers of about 58,000 residents. Latimer sent notifications to people impacted by the breach: The county’s voter registration database and tabulation system had additional security protections and were not affected, according to Latimer’s office.

Christensen casts the breach as an example of security gaps that make the county vulnerable. “When there are challenges, why is there a resistance to implementing new rules to address those challenges, for the betterment of everyone?” he asked. 

He said he’d allocate more of the office budget to security, and that he wants to “run audits locally” of the county’s elections. Following the 2020 election, conservative activists nationwide have demanded audits of local election systems. In Florida, Trump’s allies called for a forensic audit of the 2020 results, but DeSantis refused to organize one, angering the former president; some members of the “America First” slate, like Alachua County’s Judith Jensen, want to organize hand audits of future elections.

Latimer told Bolts that Christensen’s statements about the breach are an “outright lie and a completely irresponsible attempt to instill fear among our electorate.” He said, “It was a basic network intrusion that was discovered and contained quickly, before it could escalate to ransomware or anything more serious.”

On Wednesday, Christensen launched a video pointing out that Hillsborough County’s elections website crashed the day before, on election night. “This incident highlights the urgent need for new leadership to maintain trust in our election processes,” he said in the video.

The websites of dozens of counties crashed on Tuesday night, a widespread outage tied to the fact that many shared the same vendor. The vendor took responsibility, saying that its systems were overwhelmed by the increased traffic of people looking for election results. 

“Their technical issues didn’t slow us down or impede the results reporting at all,” Latimer said, “because I had backup plans in place. Our results were uploaded to the state, shared on social media and reported in our public Canvassing Board meeting, just as they always are. And yet my opponent immediately became accusatory once again.”

He continued, “It is absolutely critical that we have the right people in these positions to ensure that our elections continue to be run with actual integrity—and not threatened by those who don’t understand what that means.”

Hays, the Republican supervisor of Lake County who won his primary on Tuesday, agrees with Latimer; he told Bolts that the response to the crash shows how election skeptics fixate on an issue and conflate it with election fraud, with no evidence that any vote was affected. 

“It had nothing to do with any malicious activity. It had nothing to do with the local county. It has absolutely nothing to do with our tabulation system,” Hays said. 

“These people are blinded by their obsession and they refuse to acknowledge the facts,” Hays continued. “They don’t come up with any concrete evidence. All they bring you is hypothetical garbage. And too many people believe their nonsense.”

Editor’s note (Aug. 28): The article has been updated to include the results of the recount in the GOP primary for St. Lucie County, and a modified characterization of Amy Pennock’s proposals on public school books.

The post Six “America First” Candidates, Vying to Take Over Florida Elections, Advance to November appeared first on Bolts.

Andrew Warren is running to win back his old job as Tampa’s top prosecutor. Since the Democrat joined the race in April, he has released campaign videos, basked in endorsements, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars—all the staples of a typical campaign.

But this campaign is anything but typical. Two years ago, Warren was abruptly suspended from his office by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who said he had neglected his duties because of statements such as a promise to not prosecute abortion cases. DeSantis summarily replaced him with Susan Lopez, a Republican who immediately reversed some of Warren’s signature policies, including his effort to stop the aggressive prosecutions of Black cyclists and pedestrians in Hillsborough County. 

Voters will now weigh in for the first time since DeSantis ousted the state attorney they elected. Lopez is running for a full term, but it’s Warren who won the office the last two times it was on the ballot, in 2016 and 2020. If he wins the Democratic nomination next week, he’ll face Lopez, who is running unopposed in the GOP primary, in November. (Editor’s note: Warren prevailed in the Aug. 20 Democratic primary; he will face Lopez on Nov. 5.)

The circumstances of Warren’s removal loom large over his third run. Hillsborough County has leaned Democratic in the past, but if Warren wins, DeSantis could try suspending him again. Warren filed lawsuits arguing that DeSantis exceeded his authority when he removed him the first time, and a federal appeals court earlier this year kept his case alive. Some experts say it’d be harder for the governor to suspend him again in the future, but these legal questions remain unsettled.

“Every Democratic candidate in Florida has to campaign under the threat of DeSantis removing them solely because they’re a Democrat, solely for political reasons,” Warren told Bolts.

Last year, DeSantis also suspended the elected Democratic prosecutor of Orlando, Monique Worrell, whose sentencing practices he disagreed with. He had already removed Broward County’s Democratic sheriff, replacing him with a new sheriff who backtracked on a local reform.  

Lopez, too, rolled back Warren’s reforms within just days of replacing him. On Aug. 8, 2022, just four days after her appointment, she sent a memo to her staff announcing changes to the office’s policies. Among them: She lifted Warren’s restrictions on prosecuting people when their charges stemmed from bike and pedestrian stops conducted by the Tampa police.

“Effective immediately, any policy my predecessor put in place that called for presumptive non-enforcement of the laws of Florida is immediately rescinded. This includes the bike stop and pedestrian stop policy,” Lopez said in her memo. DeSantis had named this reform among his reasons for removing Waren, saying that it demonstrates a “fundamentally flawed and lawless understanding of his duties as a state attorney.”

Warren had set up his policy in the wake of a 2015 Tampa Bay Times investigation that revealed that the majority of cyclists stopped by the Tampa police were Black. The story sparked an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that reached the same conclusion in 2016: Of 9,121 bicycle stops made by Tampa police over a 20-month period, 73 percent of those involved Black cyclists. Tampa’s population is 26 percent Black. 

The data ignited organizing in Hillsborough County. Civil rights organizations demanded reforms from both the local police and the state attorney’s office, which handles prosecutions. In some of these cases, the office was ensnaring cyclists in the criminal legal system by charging them with misdemeanors over nonviolent actions related to the bike stops, such as riding away from police or refusing to show identification.

Once he became the state attorney in 2017, members of the local chapter of the NAACP met with Warren to ask him to stop prosecuting those cases. “We were having conversations over and over again,” recalled Yvette Lewis, president of the Hillsborough County NAACP. The effort took years, with Warren forming a Racial Justice Work Group to examine the issue in the fall of 2020, after that summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and finally releasing a new policy in January 2022.

In a memo to his staff, Warren instructed them to adopt a default approach of not prosecuting nonviolent, misdemeanor cases that result from these stops, broadening the policy’s purview to include pedestrian stops as well as bike stops. He also said line prosecutors should weigh whether the facts of the alleged crime still merit prosecution. “Actual or even perceived racial disparities in the use of bicycle and pedestrian stops undermine trust within the communities that law enforcement serves,” Warren said in a memo. 

In an interview with Bolts, Warren said “the reason why we were taking a critical look at those cases is because we don’t want to encourage that stop in the first place.” 

Prosecuting those stops without first examining them, he said, was “perpetuating the revolving door to the criminal justice system.” 

“Obviously, we want people to comply with law enforcement,” he said. “We also don’t want to put more people into the system that can have a negative impact on their ability to earn a living and potentially cost taxpayer dollars to prosecute them and take away their freedom when they hadn’t done anything wrong in the first place.”

Tampa’s Black residents cheered the change, Lewis said. “The community felt like, OK, they can take a deep breath.”

Since Lopez lifted Warren’s policy and signaled to police that the stops they made would get prosecuted again, the fear of aggressive prosecution has returned, Lewis says. 

“We were definitely devastated by what she did,” she said. “It took us 10 steps back when it comes to helping the most vulnerable people that need help.”

Lewis said she has met with Lopez about the change but has made no progress toward switching it back. “I don’t think she gets it at all,” she said. “She’s never walked in our shoes. When you try to talk to her to get understanding, she doesn’t come with an open mind.”

Erin Maloney, a spokesperson for Lopez’s office, told Bolts in an email that Warren’s policy was just for show. “By the time Andrew Warren instituted that policy, Tampa Police had already changed how bike stops were conducted altogether,” she wrote. “He took a problem that didn’t exist and offered a solution.” 

But Maloney also faulted Warren for going too far in refusing to enforce Florida law, saying, “State Attorney Lopez follows the law instead of creating blanket policies that change the law.”

In November 2022, months after she became state attorney, Lopez gave a deposition in which she seemed to confirm that the Tampa police were still sending over bike stop cases to the state’s attorney’s office during Warren’s tenure. Lopez worked as a staff prosecutor in Warren’s office for part of his tenure before she became a county judge in late 2021. She said she saw those cases come in, and criticized Warren for how he handled them. (Lopez gave this deposition as part of one of Warren’s lawsuits to be reinstated.)

It’s unclear how many people have been prosecuted under Lopez in cases that stem from bike stops. Maloney said the office does “not have a way” to  determine whether past charges were tied to such stops. Still, a review of the Hillsborough County court system database shows that Lopez’s office has pursued criminal charges in such cases. 

In March, for example, police arrested a 31-year-old Black man who was walking in South Tampa because he did not comply with commands to stop and show his hands. He was charged with resisting arrest without violence, a misdemeanor, and detained on a $500 bond. Lopez’s office took the case to trial and lost; the jury found the man not guilty. 

In another case, prosecutors sought charges against a homeless Black man who fled police on his bicycle after they tried to stop him for disobeying traffic signals. The case was dismissed, only after a judge declared the man incompetent.

Warren staunchly defended his past policy in an interview with Bolts, but he also was vague when asked whether he planned to bring it back if re-elected. 

He said he would look at the data to see whether there was a reason to implement it, noting that these cases make up just a small fraction of the 60,000 cases referred to the office each year. He also said he would “keep doing the types of things that we did before.”

Warren may be worried that DeSantis will use whatever promise he makes against him. In early January, Warren announced that he wouldn’t run for state attorney because he feared that the governor would just be able to remove him again. Up until that point, courts had rejected his pleas to overturn DeSantis’ suspension; even a federal district judge who said that DeSantis had probably acted unconstitutionally also ruled that he lacked the authority to reinstate Warren. 

Warren changed his mind about running after he secured a victory against DeSantis in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which instructed the lower court to reconsider reinstating Warren. 

Elizabeth Strauss, a local attorney, does not want Democrats to take the risk. She is running against Warren in next week’s primary and says she is a safer choice.

“A vote for Warren is a vote for Suzy,” she told Bolts repeatedly in an interview, warning that DeSantis could intervene to make sure Lopez remains in office if Warren wins.

“I just want people to vote with an informed decision and knowing that, okay, if I vote for him, there’s a chance he could get removed Day One,” Strauss said. “There’s other ways to challenge this and bring awareness to what the governor did without having the voters throw away their votes and end up with somebody that’s basically going to be his puppet.”

Strauss said she would not sign onto national policy statements like the ones Warren had joined while in office, which vowed to not prosecute cases involving abortions or anti-transgender laws. “I don’t plan on making myself vulnerable,” she said. In an email follow-up, she explained she would take a different approach to tackling issues with police stops by forming a civil rights unit. “While I will not refuse to prosecute based on any blanket policies, a Civil Rights Unit which actively investigates these matters is a more effective way to deter abuse of power by law enforcement officers,” she said.

Warren dismissed Strauss’ concerns, saying that he was focused on winning the general election in November. He has asked federal courts to expedite his case before the election, to no avail so far.

Carissa Byrne Hessick, director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina, says she can see voters reacting to Warren’s comeback effort one of two ways. “It could be the sort of thing that really motivates voters to go to the polls and check the box for him,” she said. But, she added, “They might think that was too much chaos, and we don’t want to be fighting with the state.”

Robin Lockett, Tampa Bay regional director of Florida Rising, a voting rights advocacy organization that has endorsed Warren, told Bolts that she falls in the former group. 

“I think it’s brave of Andrew to still do what’s right for the people,” she said. “He can’t run in fear.”

Some Democratic voters, meanwhile, may be living in trepidation that the governor will just keep disregarding election results, no matter the office and the Democrat who wins. Other candidates running for local office have faced a similar cloud. “Sometimes it feels like a set up—or it’s all just theater,” a Democrat running for prosecutor in St. Petersburg told Bolts two years ago. This year, Worrell is seeking her old job back in Orlando, much like Warren is in Tampa.

At a political forum in May that featured the three state attorney candidates, as well as two candidates running for public defender, one attendee told them, “All of you are subject to being suspended by the governor.” 

The post Tampa Voters Get Their Say Two Years After DeSantis Axed Their Democratic Prosecutor appeared first on Bolts.

Allison Miller, a public defender seeking to become the next chief prosecutor of Pinellas and Pasco counties in central Florida, may face one of the strangest conundrums of any candidate for political office in the United States. She has said she would not prosecute people for seeking or providing abortions, in a state whose governor recently removed from office a sitting, democratically elected prosecutor—in Tampa, just across the bay from Pinellas County (St. Petersburg)—for saying the same thing.

The repeal of Roe v. Wade in June vested enormous control over women’s reproductive decisions in local officials. There has been plenty of talk since about the resulting geographic injustices: people seeking now-illegal abortions in blue localities may at least be shielded from prosecution, the thinking goes, while their counterparts in redder areas may face criminal punishment for the same acts. But in August, after Hillsborough County (Tampa) State Attorney Andrew Warren signaled he would decline to pursue abortion cases should Florida’s 15-week ban go into effect, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis suspended and replaced him with a member of the conservative Federalist Society. (Warren has sued to get his job back; a judge has said the case should be decided at trial, but hasn’t set a date.) 

The governor’s move, part of his broader push to undermine voting rights and override democratic results to install conservatives in local offices, summons an existential question for the shape of democracy in Florida. In the face of a governor willing to overturn an election to achieve his own ends, the familiar playbook of fighting for social change at the ballot box—organizing the grassroots, galvanizing young people and people of color, elevating candidates who will fight for reproductive justice—is under siege.

The threat of further undemocratic moves by DeSantis now hangs over Miller’s race—and by extension, any election in the state. What does it even mean to run for office when the governor’s political whims could turn a win into a loss? Miller compared running in DeSantis’s Florida to the myth of Sisyphus: the boulder rolls back down the hill every time, but he pushes it up again anyway. 

“We have a governor who if you disagree with him politically, he just removes you from office,” she told Bolts. “Sometimes it feels like a set up—or it’s all just theater.”

But this sense that the game has long been rigged was part of the reason Miller decided to run in the first place. As a public defender, she says, she has represented people facing the death penalty, and she has seen over and over again how much pressure there was to obtain a capital conviction. “The way the system is set up in Florida is that the prosecution, the state, truly does hold all of the cards,” she said. And yet she has kept fighting, first as a public defender and now as an outsider running on criminal justice reform. Miller’s decision to challenge Republican State Attorney Bruce Bartlett, a DeSantis appointee, has made 2022 the first time in 30 years that Pinellas and Pasco have experienced a contested prosecutor’s race. Bartlett and DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment for this piece.

In DeSantis’s Florida, many are now haunted by similar questions about how best to approach local campaigns. DeSantis is running for re-election himself this fall against Democrat Charlie Crist, and holds a narrow lead in public polling.

Progressive advocates vow to not get discouraged by the climate of uncertainty that has accompanied Warren’s suspension. “This is a first, right?” said Sara Tabatabaie, the chief political and communications officer for Vote Pro Choice, which aims to elect candidates who will defend abortion rights across the country. “But the response is we do it again,” she added. “And the reason is because we’re not going to be intimidated by somebody like Ron DeSantis. If DeSantis wants to show everyone that he doesn’t care that the majority of Floridians are pro-choice, then let him.”

In stripping federal protections for abortion access, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision transformed down-ballot offices and races into a terrain of high-pitched political struggle. “This is the real battleground for the next decades—a real opportunity area,” said Paul Kim Bradfield, the Southern Regional Director for Run for Something, a national candidate incubator supporting Miller. “Republicans have been playing this playbook for decades… we’re kind of late to the game.”

Bradfield said over 1,300 Floridians filed a form on Run for Something’s website expressing an interest in running for local office since early May, when the Supreme Court’s decision leaked. That’s nearly three times as many as had registered interest between the beginning of 2020 and the leak.

“People are worried about what’s going on with their lives, what this means for them,” said Gretchen Johnson, the president of the St. Petersburg League of Women Voters (LWV), a nonpartisan group that promotes voter education. 

Johnson referenced the Tampa judge who ruled that a 17-year-old girl was too immature to get an abortion because her grades were poor. In August, he was ousted by voters. Historically, “most judges are retained,” Johnson said. Now, though, she added, people are realizing, “‘This is affecting my life—or someone’s life, and that matters—so we do need to pay attention.’”

But now that energy and outrage is running up against DeSantis’s strategy for bulldozing over the authority of locally-elected officials. 

“The governor has shown that …  targeting different candidates and different issues is not off the table for him,” said Bradfield. “There’s a great irony,” he added: “the Republican side has for a long time been the vocal advocates of home rule, like, ‘local government should decide this, this and this.’” Now that the left is testing those waters, though, there’s a broad move from the right to shut it down—whether via DeSantis’s suspensions or bills like the Florida legislature’s attempt to preclude Democratic municipalities from reducing their police budgets, a top priority for DeSantis after the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020. 

“It can feel almost discouraging—you put all that effort and action into things and have this person unilaterally make decisions against it,” said Bradfield. But he wasn’t willing to sink into existential doubts about the purpose of voting if the governor may remove the victor. Bradfield emphasized that candidates and voters alike seemed more motivated than disheartened. 

“Being in his crosshairs…is certainly a risk that she faces,” he said of Miller, “but I think it can also be an opportunity.”

“It’s galvanizing,” Johnson said of Florida’s landscape in the aftermath of Dobbs and of Warren’s suspension. She believes that people’s attention to local races has never been higher.

Still, DeSantis is also cracking down on voting through other means. He inspired the creation of a state police force meant to investigate elections, which local advocates warn carries the risk of intimidating voters. Suppressive efforts typically affect the people who are already the most marginalized, further limiting their political power.

In August, DeSantis announced that this newly created office was pressing felony charges against 20 people who had voted despite not being eligible because of past convictions; this built on cases filed by local prosecutors this year against residents who voted despite owing court debt. There is no indication that any of these people did so intentionally or maliciously, The Guardian reported. The charges came after Florida Republicans adopted a law that deeply obfuscated the process for regaining voting rights in 2019, during DeSantis’s first year as governor; observers warned at the time that the new regulations were bound to confuse voters, and Warren vowed to help local residents. 

That law was a direct response to a constitutional amendment approved by voters in November 2018 to expand rights restoration. The amendment had passed overwhelmingly, 65 to 35 percent. DeSantis won on the same day by under 0.5 percentage points.

“Ours is supposed to be a government of laws, not a government of individual men,” DeSantis trumpeted at his press conference announcing Warren’s suspension. But laws have to be interpreted—DeSantis himself unearthed an obscure 1936 gambling precedent in order to justify removing a state’s attorney. And the governor plainly wants the individual people interpreting those laws to be his men, so to speak.

DeSantis’s excuse for suspending Warren was a statement the prosecutor signed, along with more than 80 counterparts across the country, which vowed not to bring cases against people for seeking or providing abortion care. Florida’s new 15-week abortion ban is not yet on the books—at the moment, Florida’s state constitution protects some access to abortion. Currently the ban that Republican lawmakers passed is tied up in court, but the state supreme court has swung right under DeSantis, who has appointed four of its seven members, and may well overturn that precedent. 

Still, DeSantis maintained that Warren’s signature was tantamount to professing intent to subvert the law. The governor also cited another statement Warren had signed that condemned the criminalization of trans people and gender-affirming healthcare; though anti-trans rhetoric has been a cornerstone of the DeSantis administration, there is no specific law that criminalizes trans people or healthcare in Florida.

DeSantis has turned Warren’s firing into an opportunity to force his political preferences onto an area of the state that has repeatedly rejected them. 

In the 2016 and 2020 elections, voters in blue-leaning Hillsborough County embraced Warren, a proponent of criminal justice reform. In office, the prosecutor exercised  his discretion to lower the number of people in jail and reduce racial bias in arrests and prosecution. His ouster has sparked a rapid shift toward the tough-on-crime policies DeSantis prefers. DeSantis’s choice to replace Warren, Susan Lopez, has already overturned a number of Warren’s initiatives, including his policies against prosecuting low-level misdemeanors and arrests stemming from the Tampa police’s wildly controversial bike-stop policy.  According to a U.S. Department of Justice inquiry, that policy targeted Black people, who make up only 26 percent of Tampa’s population,  in 73 percent of stops. Lopez has also announced her intent to seek the death penalty in a case where Warren previously declined to pursue capital punishment.

Meanwhile, DeSantis has also recently replaced four Democratic members of the Broward County school board with Republicans. The members were recommended for suspension by a grand jury for failures related to school safety, but the opportunity to install more ideologically aligned successors was not wasted on the governor. “To take out four women who are Democrats and replace them with four men who are Republicans—that’s certainly not representative of the demographics of Broward County,” said Miller. Now the chair of the Florida Board of Education, who is himself a DeSantis appointee, has suggested that the Broward County school superintendent—who didn’t even join the district until well after the grand jury had finished its deliberations—should be suspended, too. 

There are five other Democratic state attorneys in Florida, and DeSantis claimed to have “reviewed” all of them during his press conference announcing Warren’s suspension. Though one signed the anti-trans criminalization statement, and several issued statements condemning the repeal of Roe v. Wade, none besides Warren clearly stated their refusal to prosecute abortion cases. And none have spoken up loudly in support of Warren since his dismissal, perhaps a tacit admission of fear that DeSantis could do the same thing again. “If DeSantis can arbitrarily suspend an elected official without one shred of evidence they have done anything wrong, how far will he go to punish anyone else who disagrees with him?” Warren wrote in a recent editorial.

Miller said she sympathized with the dilemma. “I can certainly appreciate kind of keeping your head down and doing the work and standing by the message, but maybe not publicly making yourself a target,” she said. “I know most of them and I think they all are there because they want to help people—and you don’t have the ability to do that if you’re not in office.” After all, she added, “It’s not like the governor stopped with Andrew Warren.” 

Still, Miller herself has made a different choice. “For better or worse, I speak my mind,” she said. The stakes felt too high—and too personal—not to: she is a survivor of violent crime and sexual assault. “I was held at gunpoint when I was 14, and I was raped in college,” Miller told Bolts. “And so the idea of prosecuting a rapist, I would do with enthusiasm, but the idea of prosecuting a woman who aborts the product of that rape—somebody convince me how that possibly makes our community safer.”

The post All the Governor’s Men appeared first on Bolts.

Smith, an appointee of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, lost his re-election bid on Tuesday in Hillsborough County (Tampa). This blue-tilting region, long viewed as a national bellwether, was just stripped of its prosecutor by DeSantis over his defense of abortion.

After a campaign dominated by his decision in the January abortion case, Smith was ousted by Nancy Jacobs, a local attorney in private practice. Although the election was nonpartisan, vote breakdowns suggest that Smith drew support from GOP voters while Jacobs was backed by Democrats. 

The campaign broke the mold of Florida’s judicial elections, where the local establishment typically rallies to easily carry incumbents across the finish line. The editorial board of the Tampa Bay Times, which backed Joe Biden in 2020, endorsed Smith as well as the other sitting circuit court judge on the ballot this week, lauding Smith for the “respect he shows litigants in his court” even as it acknowledged issues in the abortion decision. (The other incumbent judge easily won.) Even the county’s elected chief public defender, Democrat Julianne Holt, endorsed Smith, though she ultimately pulled her support as the race became contentious in the final stretch.

Further south, in Miami-Dade County, James Bush, the only Democratic lawmaker who voted for Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, was ousted in a primary by challenger Ashley Gantt. Bush, who frequently sided with Republicans, was also the only Democrat who supported the recent law against discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in Florida classrooms.

These twin results speak to the shockwaves felt both within Democratic politics and the general electorate ever since the Supreme Court overturned federal protections for abortion in June. Also on Tuesday, Democrats unexpectedly held a congressional seat in an upstate New York district that Joe Biden narrowly carried two years ago, adding to a streak of overperformances for the party since Dobbs; some Democrats also pointed to abortion as a factor in their win over the district attorney of Tennessee’s Shelby County earlier this month. 

John Fox, a Tampa-based Democratic operative who runs a PAC called Progressive Youth that campaigned against Smith, said the results in Florida show abortion rights is motivating voters.

“Abortion is a huge issue,” Fox told Bolts. “Voters are seeking out information on it, and anytime you can link that to voters’ minds in a genuine way, I think it’s going to be a winning issue.”

But Fox also stressed that those links are often obscure when it comes to the role of local officials, despite the mountain of races where abortion is on the line this year. Fox said he first made the connection to Smith’s race when he read about the judge’s January decision, but said it was hard for him to convince people to pay attention to such a downballot race. “These races are just so low information,” he told Bolts. “The chance that your life is going to be affected by a bad judge is significantly higher risk than a bad state House member or state Senator, and nobody really kind of knows what’s going on.”

Progessive Youth sent mailers to voters that hit Smith for ruling “based on his religious beliefs—not the law.” Another mailer sent by the same organization was specific to the Jane Doe case, stating, “Judge Jared Smith thinks women are too dumb to make their own bodily choices.”

Smith sought to save his job by rallying religious conservatives. “I’m a believer, I’m a judge and I’m a Christian,” he declared while campaigning in a church. Smith is also associated with a group that attacked Jacobs for having a “woke” agenda, Creative Loafing Tampa Bay reported earlier this month. 

“I think the only religion that belongs in the courtroom is the rule of law,” Jacobs told Bolts on Wednesday when asked about Smith’s comments.

But Smith’s record also testifies to the vast authority local officials already wielded over people’s access to abortion before Dobbs, let alone now. 

Smith’s decision in the January case was overturned by an appeals court that ruled he had abused his discretion in holding that “Jane Doe” was too immature to be granted a waiver from parental notification laws. But the very fact that he heard the teenager’s plea stems from restrictions Florida adopted that empower local judges to arbitrarily bestow reproductive rights upon specific teenagers, in a process known as “judicial bypass.” An investigation published by Mother Jones in 2014 documented how conservative laws combine with local anti-abortion judges in Florida to close the door for hundreds of minors every year. 

Jacobs would not comment to Bolts on Smith’s decision in January beyond pointing to the appeals court ruling that faulted his reasoning. She also stressed that she would apply Florida’s laws on abortion regardless of what they may be. 

Florida has not banned abortion at the moment, and for now a state supreme court precedent bars such a ban, but the state is currently implementing a 15-week ban, and the conservative supreme court could revisit its precedent. The state also has plenty of restrictions like a parental notification mandate that led to Smith’s decision in January.

Smith’s defeat also comes just weeks after DeSantis suspended the Democratic prosecutor Hillsborough County voters elected in 2016 and 2020, Andrew Warren, and replaced him with a conservative ally, Susan Lopez, who has promptly rolled back reforms put in place by her predecessor. In justifying his decision, which Warren is now challenging in court, DeSantis pointed to Warren’s public statement that he would not prosecute abortion cases. 

In ousting Smith, whom DeSantis appointed to his circuit court seat in 2019, Hillsborough voters signaled their distaste for the anti-abortion policies that the governor is only escalating. 

But DeSantis was more successful in other primaries on Tuesday in his quest to  reshape the state to his liking. DeSantis pushed to move local school boards to the right, endorsing and campaigning for candidates who express alarm about discussions of racism and the rights of LGBTQ students. Most of the candidates he endorsed across the state prevailing on Tuesday, including two in Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county. Two of three school board candidates he endorsed in Hillsborough County also won.

A rare DeSantis failure in those school board races occurred in Alachua County (Gainesville), where  the governor had also ousted an elected official out under controversial circumstances. Diyonne McGraw, a former school board member who was removed from her position by the governor over objections to her residency in 2021 (those objections are no longer operative, according to The Alligator), won her old seat back, beating the conservative school board member the governor had appointed to replace her. 

In November, DeSantis will face Charlie Crist, a former Republican governor turned Democratic member of Congress. Crist, who supports abortion rights, cinched the Democratic nomination for governor on Tuesday. November will also decide control of the state legislature, an attorney general race that pits a Republican incumbent against  a former Democratic prosecutor who was herself targeted by a GOP governor over her reform stance, as well as the retention of five of the seven justices on Florida’s conservative Supreme Court.

Hundreds of thousands of Floridians will be barred from voting in those elections as a result of Florida’s extremely harsh felony disenfranchisement rules, including if they are too poor to pay off their court debt. DeSantis announced last week that a new elections police force set up this year was indicting people who erroneously registered to vote local Republicans in the state have already been prosecuting people for months for registering when they owed court debt, even though the state does not provide information to voters regarding their eligibility. 

Still, Fox is urging Floridians to pay attention and engage with local elections, like races for judge. “One of the lessons that people learned ever since 2016 is sometimes you just gotta—nobody is coming to the rescue,” he said. “If you see something and it bothers you, sometimes you just got to do it.”

The post Voters Oust Florida Judge Who Denied Teenager’s Abortion Request Because of Bad Grades appeared first on Bolts.

The suspension of this Democratic official, announced by the Republican governor at a news conference where he was flanked by Hillsborough County’s Republican sheriff and other local officials, is the latest chapter in the GOP’s sustained attacks on reproductive rights and transgender rights in Florida, as well as broader criminal justice reform efforts. 

DeSantis based the suspension on Warren’s statements that his office would not prosecute abortion-related cases and cases involving anti-transgender laws. DeSantis also mentioned Warren’s policies establishing a presumption against prosecuting certain behaviors.

DeSantis claimed that with those statements and policies Warren “neglected” his duties and “display[ed] a lack of competence” to carry out his duties. 

DeSantis replaced Warren with Susan Lopez, a local judge who is a member of the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society. His decision effectively kicked the Democratic Party out of an office it won in both 2016 and 2020, in a county that DeSantis himself lost by nine percentage points in 2018.

Florida Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat and fierce critic of DeSantis, called the governor’s move “a fascist approach to governing, if you can even call it governing.”

“It’s not about law and order. It’s about control,” Eskamani told Bolts. “He’s not only stripping away our personal liberties, but he is removing those who have the guts to stand up to him.” 

The move comes as Florida, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, implements its 15-week abortion ban and considers more extreme bans. It also comes as the state fights challenges in court to the law known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as well as a law banning trans girls and women from girls and women’s sports. In a particularly extreme step, the DeSantis administration also has filed a complaint against a restaurant in Miami because of its drag brunch, attempting to take away the business’s liquor license.

Warren had also pledged to not prosecute any ban on gender-affirming care for minors, though Florida does not have such a ban right now.

Warren’s statement on Thursday suggested he would be fighting back, although Warren himself declined to comment to Bolts and an adviser did not respond to a question asking if Warren planned to challenge the suspension.

“Today’s political stunt is an illegal overreach that continues a dangerous pattern by Ron DeSantis of using his office to further his own political ambition,” Warren said in the statement. “It spits in the face of the voters of Hillsborough County who have twice elected me to serve them, not Ron DeSantis.”

The move from DeSantis represents the most aggressive action yet from opponents of criminal legal reform efforts to derail the ambitions of local prosecutors elected on promises to reform the system and reduce incarceration. 

“We don’t elect people in one part of the state to have veto power over what the entire state decides on these important issues,” DeSantis said at the press conference. 

“Andrew Warren has put himself, publicly, above the law,” he added, citing concerns about “individual prosecutors nullify[ing] laws that were enacted by the people’s representatives.” He compared Warren to reform-minded prosecutors elected in California. “We are not going to allow this pathogen that’s been around the country of ignoring the law, we are not going to let that get a foothold here in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said.

But Aramis Ayala, a former state attorney who has faced her own attacks from DeSantis, called the governor’s move “the latest assault on Floridians’ fundamental rights and freedoms.”

“The rapid slide towards autocracy when it suits their political agenda is dangerous, appalling, and incredibly concerning,” Ayala, a Democrat who is now running for attorney general, said in a statement she shared with Bolts. 

Ayala announced shortly after becoming the chief prosecutor in the district that includes Orlando in 2016 that she would not bring capital prosecutions and declined to do so in a specific case. Republican Governor Rick Scott countered by reassigning the prosecution to another state attorney. Although Ayala challenged the move, the state’s Supreme Court eventually upheld the governor’s authority to reassign death-eligible cases under her jurisdiction in a 5-2 decision in 2017. 

On Thursday, DeSantis went much further, immediately suspending Warren from his office. 

Ayala on Thursday denounced the new move as antidemocratic. Warren “was elected and entrusted by the people—not once but twice—and it is the job of the elected state attorney to exercise prosecutorial discretion in the community they serve,” she said. “The suggestion that there was malfeasance or a dereliction of duty by the Hillsborough State Attorney Office is a dictatorial response and attack on the constitutionally protected right of free speech.”

Republicans elsewhere in the country have mounted parallel efforts to sideline prosecutors who promote criminal justice reform, though none has yet to go as far as DeSantis’s move on Thursday. Many governors do not have the power to unilaterally suspend local officials.

Pennsylvania Republicans have sought impeachment proceedings against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a progressive who easily won re-election last year; one Republican this year even ran for governor on a platform of ending DA elections in Philadelphia and nowhere else in the state. Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in New York, is promising to take action against Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who has like Warren set presumptions of not prosecuting some lower-level crimes. 

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is likely to dramatically increase these clashes between the anti-abortion Republican politicians who run the state government in red states and Democratic officials who often govern urban areas in those states. Dozens of prosecutors in states like Arizona, Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin, have said they will not enforce abortion bans, and some Republicans have signaled that they are looking for workarounds specific to their state like having the attorney general step in. 

In Florida, DeSantis’s executive order asserted that he has the authority to suspend Warren under Article 4, Section 7, of the state’s constitution, which sets out the governor’s authority for suspensions over issues like “neglect of duty.” DeSantis also used the provision in 2019 to suspend the Broward County sheriff from office, using the same claims of neglect of duty and incompetence. There, however, DeSantis acted shortly after a report was issued on the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where 17 students were killed. DeSantis’s decision to suspend the sheriff was based on that report’s conclusions about the training and preparation of law enforcement under the sheriff’s command, and it was upheld by the Florida Supreme Court.

But the broad move by DeSantis against Warren included no such report underlying it. It also made no mention of any cases that DeSantis objects to. The governor’s executive order instituting the suspension only mentions the prosecutor’s “public proclamations of non-enforcement.” These issues are certain to come up in any challenge to the suspension.

DeSantis’s claim that the announcement of a declination policy constitutes a failure of duty that fits under the state constitution rules may also come under scrutiny. 

Earlier this year, a conservative state Senator in Florida championed a bill this year that would have authorized the governor to suspend a local prosecutor who announces a blanket policy of not declining certain cases. The bill provided “that a state attorney adopting certain blanket policies constitutes a failure to execute his or her duty.” That bill did not pass the legislature, dying in the state Senate. Still, DeSantis interpreted Warren’s blanket policies as a neglect of duty in his announcement today.

Eskamani highlighted the hypocrisy of DeSantis suspending Warren because of steps he’s taken not to enforce certain laws, saying, ”this is the same governor who’s told school districts to ignore federal Title IX guidelines, especially on LGBTQ+ care and discrimination.”

Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, the organization behind nationwide prosecutors’ joint statements on transgender rights and abortion rights that DeSantis cited in his order, pointed out that many prosecutors, including some conservatives, choose to not charge certain misdemeanors, a practice DeSantis assailed today. “There’s a potential for a legal challenge over the erosion of voter choice,” she told Bolts.

Ayala echoed that point in her statement. “Since when does the governor have veto power over the people’s choice?”

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