- [Newscaster] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- [Newscaster] Coming up next, new details on those 20 ex-felons arrested for illegally voting.

The lawsuit is filed by a USF student and professor against the state's new Anti Woke law.

The candidates for Lieutenant Governor become focal points for criticism and the state's largest utility company uses dark money to sway elections.

All coming up right now on Florida This Week.

(majestic music) - Welcome back.

Last month, the Governor announced that 20 people around the state were being charged for committing voter fraud in the 2020 election.

- This is something where we sprung into action very quickly.

We got the money July 1st, already have hired people, already going to work, and I think it shows that this is something that we take very seriously as a state.

- All were charged with felonies under a state law that bars people convicted of violent crimes and sexual assault from having their voting rights restored even after they've served their sentences.

Yet, now questions are being raised about whether those arrested actually violated the law.

The 20 who were arrested say they received a voter registration card from their county election supervisor's office and some were told they were eligible to vote by multiple government officials.

Mary Ellen Claus is the capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times, and she's been reporting on the people who were arrested or charged for illegally voting and she joins us now.

Mary Ellen, nice to see you again.

- Hi, good to be here.

- Let me, first of all correct myself, I said that 20 people were arrested.

So far, how many people have been arrested?

- Well they announced the intent to arrest 20 people, but only 19 that we are aware of have been actually arrested.

- Okay.

So I wanna ask you about intent.

I mean, as you're reporting this story and you talk to some of these people, my understanding is that there has to be intent to violate this part of Florida law.

Was there intent on the part of these folks who have been charged?

- Well, that is going to be a pivotal question as the statewide prosecutor attempts to get prosecutions on these cases and for the state to get a conviction for a third degree felony, for the crime of voting as an unqualified elector, they have to prove that the people who voted, illegally and willfully intended to break the law.

Now all of them, as you mentioned, have received voter identification cards after they filled out a voter registration form.

All of them also under state law have been exempt from getting their automatic, their rights restored after having served as, served in prison for a couple of the isolated crimes, and those crimes are the crime of murder and the crime of sexual assault and sexual lewdness of conduct, that kind of thing.

So these people, many of them told us they were just very confused that they were under the impression that this statewide constitutional amendment that granted felons the right to have their voting rights restored would be something that would apply to them and the state then just sent them a voter registration card, even though the state's job is to keep track of who is unqualified.

- Well, I want to ask you about that.

Is it the state's job or is it the local election supervisor in each county?

Is it their responsibility to vet these people to make sure that they are eligible to vote?

Is it at the state or is it the local election supervisor?

- Well, it's interesting because as this constitutional amendment was being implemented, the 2020 election was gonna be the first time we tested it and at the time the former secretary of state Laura Lee was saying on the record and telling legislators that it was the responsibility of the state to flag those who were ineligible to vote that cycle.

Now Governor DeSantis is now saying it's the responsibility of county election officials, but they have no way to keep track of the felon database that the state owns and runs and the problem is the state doesn't actually have a singular database.

That is one of the weaknesses of the way this law is being implemented is that county elections officials, in order to validate it themselves, they have to go through both several different agencies in order to confirm whether felons are indeed ineligible to vote.

- Does a local supervisor of elections have the right to just say, no, you can't vote, or do they have to assume that if somebody signs up to vote, they have the right to vote?

- Yes, that's exactly right.

I mean, they have to give people a certain number of days to prove that they were wrongly allowed, left off the voter rolls and so supervisors really do have a difficult job here because the law requires them to give people the opportunity to prove that they are eligible to vote, and it's really impossible for individuals oftentimes to see where they are on the state's list.

- Shouldn't somebody that's been in prison as a felon and they've committed murder or committed a sexual offense know that under state law, they shouldn't sign up to vote?

- Right.

That's exactly right.

So those are the two conditions that the state should just be reminding people, if you leave prison, and then most of these people, it's not just leaving prison, but if they have any probation time, any fines, that's when your sentence is complete, and for these people, there needs to just be a better job of communicating that they are not eligible to vote.

There was just such mass confusion and there was a big drive to get people registered to vote in 2020 and there just needs to be fixes to the system.

- I think I read in one of your stories that somebody signed up to vote thinking, well, if the state rejects me, then I know that I'm not eligible to vote, but it was kind of a test by the ex-felon to see if they were allowed to vote.

- Yeah, yeah, that's right.

I mean, they thought, well, the state knows.

I don't know if I'm eligible or not.

The state should know, and then the state sent them and that happened to be in Broward county, I believe that individual was in, and that is the same county where Pete Antonacci, who is then the Broward supervisor of elections and is now in charge of the Governor's Office of Election Crimes and Security.

So the irony here is that even those who should know the best, were making mistakes.

- So we now have this new election police force.

That's not their technical name, but that's what a lot of people are calling it here in Florida.

We've got a big staff, it's got tens of millions of dollars in a budget as the governor just said and its job is to enforce all election laws in the state of Florida.

From your reporting, is it enforcing all election laws in the state of Florida?

- Well, you mentioned earlier introducing this segment that there is other crimes that are being, getting some attention and we've been looking pretty deeply at election fraud, as it relates to campaign finance reform, campaign finance schemes, where individuals or actually corporations and donors are hiding the true source of the election spending and they're doing it with some very sophisticated shell games essentially and so that is a violation of the state law on straw donor bans, where you're not supposed to be contributing money in the name of another.

So these nonprofit, oftentimes political committees are donating, are the contributor of money and you don't know who's behind them and that is the kind of shield that these companies are able to operate and the question is, is this a violation of state election law?

People who study this kind of thing, and lawyers who've looked at it, have told us they think it is.

- And so far we know that there have been straw donors recently here in Florida, so far, no charges against them.

This is that whole dark money issue, right?

- Right.

So this is in shorthand, it's called dark money because under federal law, you can contribute to a non-profit political committee and they don't have to identify who their donors are and the result is those committees then send money to a political committee that does reveal its donors but the problem is that you can't really trace it back to the source and so voters are, they don't really know who's behind the mailers and the ghost candidates that are paid, that were paid to run to siphon votes away in some elections.

It's a question that you'd think if we were really going after election fraud, this might be something that the elections office might start in looking at, but they actually told us that it's really not gonna be our purview.

That should be something where people can file a complaint and the complaint can go to the elections commission.

- Well, Mary Ellen Claus, thanks for your reporting and thanks for coming on the program.

- You're welcome.

Thanks Rob.

(majestic music) - A University of South Florida student and a USF professor along with a campus group called The First Amendment Forum are suing in federal court to block the state's new Anti Woke law.

The law which the governor calls, the Stop Woke Act, prohibits workplace training or classroom instruction that makes anyone feel guilt, anguish, or other psychological distress related to race, color, national origin or sex because of actions committed in the past.

The lawsuit names USF's Board of Trustees, the State Board of Governors and other state officials urging them to stop the law's implementation and joining us now are the two people who filed the lawsuit.

Dr. Adriana Navoa is a USF history professor who teamed up with her student Sam Rechek in filing and thank you both for joining us.

Great to see you.

- Great to see you too.

- Sam, I wanna start with you.

What are your first amendment concerns about this new law?

- Well, I know from firsthand experience that students at USF and on college campuses find real value in discussing controversial issues, especially the issues that are touched on in the Stop Woke Act.

An issue that, an issue often generates controversy because people care a lot about it and so that's a sign that it's actually more important that it should make its way into classrooms and college campuses but instead, the Stop Woke Act tries to prevent precisely those controversial issues from reaching the places where they need to be debated.

- Dr. Navoa, how has this affected your teaching?

I read in the Tampa Bay Times that you have withdrawn articles about Jackie Robinson, the football or the baseball hero from your class.

Why?

- Well, this law completely changes the dynamic of my class.

To give you an example, when I prepare a class, I always need to be concerned about what I need to teach according to my discipline, what kind of thing, are important for students to know, considering that they want to become historians, or they want just to learn about a certain period.

That is completely different now because besides choosing the readings and that, I need to scrutinize each of the readings to see how they fit, what it means to teach in Florida, according to this law, which is where censorship starts to obviously take a role into that.

You asked me specifically about Jackie Robinson, that particular reading and other ones that I have are related to how Latino players came to the United States.

What happened with baseball?

Because I don't teach U.S. history and they all obviously enter on the issue of segregation in baseball and the painful experiences of people who went through that.

To give you an idea, because baseball was not segregated in Cuba, for example, players who played together in the same team in Cuba when they came to the United States, they will play in different teams.

According if they pass as white, or if they didn't and play in the nigger leagues.

That meant a complete obviously system for them to play.

So the reading address, this issue and address the issues of collective responsibility in sports.

So that's only one example that I can give about that.

- It would seem that Jackie Robinson's pretty uncontroversial.

Yet you feel like you can't teach about Jackie Robinson because some of the students will feel bad about racism.

- No, that's not what I feel.

What I feel is that that particular reading includes comments that will fall within the law, because yes, Jackie Robinson obviously is a hero today and is accepted, but that was not always the case and in any historical reading, that's what is discussed.

- Sam, I think what the law is trying to do is accommodate every student so that they aren't made to feel ashamed of the actions of their ancestors and what may have happened in the past, the actions that their ancestors have, may have been involved in.

Isn't that a good goal?

That's the goal of the law?

Shouldn't that be the direction the state takes?

- Well, so in our dealings with each other in society, if people wanna, if individuals wanna make the choice to be accommodating out of the goodness of their hearts and their certain personal morality, well that's one thing and that's, I think amiable, but knowing what it means to accommodate someone in any particular situation is very contextual.

It's very situational and that's very tough to legislate.

So, because it's so hard to pin down a definition of what it means to accommodate in any given situation, I'm extremely wary of any attempt from the state to try to legislate how we are to be accommodating, especially in a classroom environment.

The law claims it's promoting ideological.

Ideological diversity rather and I'm all for that.

It's what makes our universities great, but it just doesn't just happen through the passing of a law.

- Can I say something about this because this is probably the most shocking component of the law for me as professionally, as a historian, because the Judeo-Christian tradition that the government of Florida embraces, the idea of collective guilt is ever present.

These religions believe that there is an original sin for which we need to repent, even when we never met Adam and Eve.

Even obviously God himself through Jesus died for our sins, even when he didn't commit any of them and also believing only in communion and becoming one, we find redemption.

So collective guilt is a part that is very much in our culture and as in the past, when I went to mass a Catholic, that was always present there and the mass is about collective guilt and repent.

So it seems to me that according to this law, we can experience in the classroom now all forms of collective guilt that are related with our culture, but the sin of slavery and racism, which is one that we can not address in that manner.

So for me, this is, and again, it's all about religion.

Our secular culture is impregnated by this idea.

So it seems a very contradictory position.

- All right, well Adrian and Sam, thanks a lot.

I wish we had more time, but thank you for coming on Florida This Week.

- Yeah.

Thank you.

Bye bye.

(majestic music) - The running mates of both gubernatorial candidates have been drawn into controversies in the past few days.

- The president of the teachers union in Miami-Dade County, Democrat Karla Hernandez Mats, who was picked by Charlie Christ as his Lieutenant governor running mate, is being accused by Republicans of having ties to a convicted sexual predator.

That person, a former Dade county teacher and union activist named Wendell Nibbs is now a convicted sexual predator serving an eight year prison sentence for sexual battery against minors.

Republicans have accused Hernandez of protecting a sexual predator for years and accompanying him through numerous investigations into sexual assaults of multiple students.

However, fact checkers with a group called Popular Information, say the allegation is false and that the union played no role into the investigation of criminal abuse.

Ron DeSantis' running mate is also under a cloud.

Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nunez recently endorsed the governor's plan to bus Cuban migrants arriving in the sunshine state to Delaware.

Many of those Cubans are getting here by fleeing to central America, and then traveling to the U.S. Southern border in the largest Exodus in more than 40 years.

When asked about Cubans who flee the political situation on the island, Nunez indicated she approved busing them out of Florida saying that DeSantis is going to send them very frankly to the state of Delaware.

The state of the president.

Later Nunez backtracked on exporting the refugees saying that her comments had been distorted and said that she was not in favor of shipping political refugees out of state.

Her initial remarks are being used by some Democrats and Cuban exiles to criticize DeSantis on the issue of immigration.

Join us now in our panel, Michael van Sickler is the Assistant Managing Editor of News at the Tampa Bay Times and Matt Dixon is the Tallahassee Bureau Chief for Political Florida.

Great to see both of you.

- Thanks for having me.

- Thanks for having me.

- Mike, let me ask you first, does anybody care who runs for Lieutenant governor and these stories are pretty serious?

Do they have an impact?

Do they have a potential impact on the head of the ticket?

- I mean, that's a good question.

Lieutenant governors tend to be in recent Florida history, not very consequential political figures.

It hasn't been a powerful position under Rick Scott.

It wasn't a particularly powerful position under Charlie Christ and even Jeb Bush, but, remember it's a heartbeat away from the governor's office.

If something were to happen for somebody who were to win the governor's office and they were to move on to another office or leave for whatever reasons this would be the person that would move into it.

So it's an important position in that regard and in terms of whether or not these stories matter, I think in the situation of Karla Hernandez Mats, the public doesn't really know her.

So outta the gate, this was kind of a story that was somewhat dominating the initial news cycle of her announcement and I think in that game, the GOP was pretty successful in kind of muddying up what the public's first perception of Karla Hernandez Mats would be, and that's always considered a win in politics if you can kind of do that.

- Matt, I think both of these women are kind of stand-ins for the gubernatorial candidates when it comes to interacting with the Spanish speaking community, an important constituency here in the state of Florida.

Might these stories have some impact on the top of the ticket?

- I really don't think so.

The only opportunity the Lieutenant governors or running mates really have to impact anything is to sort of screw things up and I don't necessarily mean screw things up by making a mistake themselves, but these sort of toxic news cycles and bad headlines, I don't know if they break through enough at the Lieutenant governor or the running mate level to really impact the top of the ticket.

I am skeptical about that, but by and large, the sort of frame with which I view running mates when governors or gubernatorial can pick them is they don't matter a ton.

There's a lot of instant analysis about what demographics, what regions of the state or what special interest constituencies might get off the bench or get more energized because of the pick, but I think by and large time and time again, that that doesn't really play out, and also Mike's right.

The modern political history doesn't have very active Lieutenant governors.

You have to go back a little before my time, but Jeb Bush and Tony Jennings was an example I've been pointed to time and time again, of the last time there's really been an active Lieutenant governor.

Other than that, they've just sort of, shown up at ribbon cuttings and stuff like that.

- All right.

Well, the Tampa Bay Times reports that the state's largest utility company, Florida Power and Light has been the subject of a torrent of news stories, revealing how it's political consultants funneled money through nonprofit groups and shell companies to manipulate elections and finance attacks on the utility's political foes.

- [Newscaster] Election law experts tell the Tampa Bay Times Miami Herald that the payments were a potential violation of state campaign finance laws that banned the use of straw donors to shield the true source of campaign funds, as well as federal tax rules for nonprofits.

It's a practice commonly called dark money and the question is, will any state agency investigate the alleged wrongdoing by FP and L?

- Matt, you've been covering this.

There's a new story every day about dark money, about ghost candidates and new revelations about Florida Power and Light.

What's the big picture?

What was Florida Power and Light trying to accomplish?

- Well to answer the question, like leading up to this, will any state agency or the legislature investigate?

I think we can almost concretely say no.

I mean, FPL has largely funded Florida's sort of Republican majorities for a very long time now.

I would be shocked if anyone in the legislative setting or someone in the administration sort of got off the bench and really took a hard look at this.

So it's been up to sort of members of the media and essentially critics of large utility companies so far and as far as motivations go, I mean, I think with all dark money organizations and this certainly expands beyond utilities, it's not just utility companies, the goal is to not have people see who you're supporting politically either because you don't want them to know who you're supporting, or conversely, sometimes candidates don't, they want to get the money, but they don't want to be associated with the source of the money, and in this case, utilities can sometimes be very unpopular.

If you wanna finance things that are, I'm not an attorney, so I'm not gonna say definitively illegal, but certainly sit in a gray area, if you wanna finance activities that sit in that spot, you're probably gonna wanna do quietly.

- Michael, there was a report out this week that in the next four years, Florida Power and Light is gonna have a $5 billion increase in revenue and we've seen across the state with the investor owned utilities that people's electric rates have been going up pretty dramatically over the past year or two.

Can you draw a line between the use of utility companies dark money, and the rate increases that we're seeing on our electric bills?

- Well, I mean, logistically speaking, the Public Service Commission is the entity that's supposed to control and they approve all proposed rate increases.

So the members that sit on that, and it's a highly paid position, they make six figures, I think, they are appointed by the governor and then the legislature confirms them, and so those two entities tend to get some, a lot of campaign donations from utilities and is it because of that role that they play, that's a big role, they're basically overseeing, and then they confirm the people who are gonna approve of any proposed future rates and this PSC for many years now usually says yes when a rate's proposed to go up.

They're not necessarily aggressively fighting these rate increases.

- All right.

Well, Michael and Matt, thanks a lot for coming on Florida This Week.

- Great, thank you.

- Thanks for having us.

- And thank you for joining us.

Send us your comments @ftwwedu.org.

You can view this and past shows online at wedu.org or on the PBS app.

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