A joint investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald said a ballot initiative to allow Florida card rooms to become full casinos was “one of the largest cases of election-related fraud in recent history,” with petitions containing thousands of falsified signatures. That aside, it’s unlikely the political action committee, Florida Voters in Charge, can gather enough valid signatures to put the issue on the ballot.
The $49.5 million campaign was funded by the Las Vegas Sands Corp. The casino giant has proposed another constitutional amendment that would authorize three new Las Vegas-style casinos in Florida.
Sands is behind the PAC, which wants to transform card rooms into casinos; Sands specifically wants to turn a Jacksonville card room into a full-fledged gaming hall. During the company’s second-quarter earnings conference call on July 21, Chairman and CEO Rob Goldstein said, “We’re successfully gathering signatures to get a vote in the fall of 2022 for a land-based opportunity.”
But Florida elections officials said signatures are being forged in an attempt to get the amendment on the ballot. Discrepancies first were noticed in Lake County, where the Supervisor of Elections Alan Hays said thousands of people in and around the county may have received a letter notifying them their signature may have been forged.
Hays said out of nearly 20,000 gambling petitions, his office rejected 12,000. He added his office gave 3,000 petitions to the state attorney’s office to confirm fraudulent signatures. “All of it looks like it may have been from the same person, many of them done by the same hand. It’s an inordinate number, typically if 5 percent or 10 percent are rejected we wouldn’t think any of it, but this is a very large number. It is so unfortunate that people will resort to these measures,” he said
In Marion County, Elections Supervisor Wesley Wilcox said he’s seeing the same fraudulent petitions. In fact, he said, “A petition was submitted with my name and a recorded signature.” Wilcox said he’s sending about 900 petitions to the state attorney’s office for examination. He said forging a signature on a petition is a felony. The Fifth Judicial Circuit District of the State’s Attorney’s Office confirmed it received complaints from all the counties it serves.
Florida Voters in Charge legal counsel Jim McKee acknowledged the allegations against his group were “very serious,” but came from “individuals and entities whose sole goal” is to block the ballot initiative. He said under Florida law, the group must submit all petitions gathered, “even those known or suspected to be inaccurate. It absolutely does not benefit FVIC in any way to turn in petitions which cannot be validated by supervisors of election.”
McKee said the group supports and encourages the investigation and prosecution of anyone who turned in fraudulent petitions. “FVIC and its contractors have terminated thousands of petition gatherers who have not met the quality control standards. It will continue to do everything in its power to ensure full compliance with Florida law while working to give Florida voters a choice in the 2022 election,” he said.
Twelve days out from the February 2 deadline to turn in all signatures to the Secretary of State’s Division of Elections, Florida Voters In Charge was 298,000 signatures short. Another petition drive, Florida Education Champions, backed by FanDuel and DraftKings seeking voter approval for open sports betting, was behind 484,000 signatures. Combined, the two campaigns have spent more than $90 million.
While Las Vegas Sands was subsidizing the petition drive for card-room casinos, the Seminole Tribe of Florida was desperately trying to stop it. Both sides have been accused of intimidation and abuse. Among other disruptive actions, the tribe hired away Sands’ petition circulators and paid people to observe and record signature gatherers. It paid a Palm Beach-based firm, Cornerstone Solutions, $6 million through its political committee, Standing Up For Florida, and bought $4 million in ads to convince people not to sign the petitions. December 30 was the last day signatures could be collected and elections supervisors have until the end of January to count them.
Tribal organizers alleged in court documents that Sands paid petition circulators per signature, a first-degree misdemeanor under state law punishable by up to a year in jail. They submitted contracts and affidavits from petition drive workers. One of them signed an affidavit stating he was hired to gather signatures; his contract indicated he was paid $450,000 for every 25,000 petitions submitted, up to $2.7 million.
Another individual, Larry Laws, who was hired to find signature gatherers for the effort, stated in an affidavit employees would be paid hourly, not per signature, but also would receive a bonus of $2,500 for every 300 signature. Laws also said he was instructed to destroy at least 2,000 petitions from 15 counties that would be rejected by local elections supervisors. But instead of destroying them, Laws’ affidavit says he sent them to the secretary of state. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this, in the money that’s been spent, in my whole 25 years as a petition-gatherer,” Laws said.
In Winter Garden, the Real Estate Collection owner and broker Kari Fleck said some of the petitioners set up a table outside her office unannounced and proceeded to call out to patrons walking by. “I’m really not objecting to people petitioning for change, but by setting up the table on our property, it has the potential to lead people to the assumption that we are associated with the petitioners, which we are not,” Fleck said.
The manager at the Winter Garden farmers market said petition gatherers “try to set up tables, but I control them from setting up inside the market, because everyone there has had to pay and put in the work to be there. A lot of these people have really nasty social skills, and it seems the freedom of speech is really being taken way too far. People come here to shop and hang out with their friends and families, not to be solicited for a cause.”
Local elections supervisors have been overwhelmed with thousands of suspected fraudulent petition forms. The supervisors are responsible for verifying the petitions were completed and signed by a Floridian. Wilcox said more than 80 percent of those delivered to his office cannot be verified. He said, “Somebody will do 300 petitions and have two acceptances. It’s just astronomical. He noted each petition includes the name of the circulator, along with an attestation the information is true under penalty of perjury. “You put 20 of these together and oh, my gosh, people are going to go to jail for 20, 30, 40 years,” Wilcox said.
Similar scenarios are occurring in numerous other Florida counties. In Manatee County, for example, Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett said fewer than half, approximately 41 percent, of the more than 37,000 petitions turned into his office are legit. Bennett said verifying if the forms are phony or not costs the county and taxpayers money. “It’s probably costing us now somewhere in the neighborhood of a dollar apiece to a dollar fifty to process these because of the excess overtime that we’re in. They’re wearing my staff down. We’re having to kick other things down the road that we would normally be doing this time of year, and it’s all because of bad petitions,” he said.
Meanwhile, a petition to permit sports betting in Florida outside of the Seminoles folded their tent last week. DraftKings and FanDuel were the main sponsors. The organization, Florida Education Champions, conceded there wasn’t enough time to gather the 782,000 signatures needed. While the organization claimed to have collected more than 1 million signatures, the Secretary of State’s office had only validated 471,000 by last week.
“We are extremely encouraged by the level of support we saw from the more than one million Floridians who signed our petition and thank them for their efforts in wanting to bring safe and legal sports betting to Florida, while funding public education. While pursuing our mission to add sports betting to the ballot, we ran into some serious challenges, but most of all, the COVID-19 surge decimated our operations and ability to collect in-person signatures,” Florida Education Champions spokesperson Christina Johnson said in a release. “We want to thank our local Supervisors of Elections and staff members for their diligent work in verifying petitions. We will be considering all options in the months ahead to ensure that Floridians have the opportunity to bring safe and legal sports betting to the state, along with hundreds of millions of dollars annually to support public education.”
