High Turnout Wide Margins recently traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the 2025 summer convening of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions [PLEJ], and spoke with election officials from across the county — and world — about the elections work they are doing in their communities.
In this episode, hosts Eric Fey and Brianna Lennon speak with Paul Lux, the Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections, and Mark Earley, the Supervisor of Elections in Leon County.
They spoke about how the lists of registered voters are already maintained in Florida, and about how the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE Act — a proposed piece of federal legislation that would require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections — could impact that process.
High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits:
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Associate Producer: Katie Quinn
Digital Producer: Mark Johnson
Transcription of the episode is as follows:
Paul Lux: I found myself, by virtue of my large military population, on the top of the list of “Bad boys” for not doing my required list maintenance, and I could show people — “Here's the report. I literally removed 10, 15, 20,000 people from the voter rolls,” you know, “at the end of a list maintenance year.”
“I made this many people inactive.”
I can show them I'm doing all the work, and they're like, “Why do these people keep saying you're not doing it?” and I'm like, “Well, you'll have to ask them, I don't know.” They say I'm not doing “enough” list maintenance, and my answer, typically is, “I don't have an ‘enough meter’ to measure that with. I'm doing what the law requires me to do.”
[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]
Eric Fey: All right. Welcome to another exciting episode of High Turnout Wide Margins. For this episode, we're coming to you from the PLEJ conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am Eric Fey, Director of Elections in St. Louis County, Missouri. I'm here with my co-host —
Brianna Lennon: Brianna Lennon, County Clerk for Boone County, Missouri.
Eric Fey: And today we have two guests on this exciting episode, gentlemen, would you like to introduce yourselves?
Paul Lux: I'm Paul Lux. I'm the Supervisor of Elections for Okaloosa County, Florida, and I am also the chair of the EI-ISAC [Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center].
Mark Earley: I'm Mark Earley. I'm the Supervisor of Elections in Leon County, Florida. That's Tallahassee for those who are wondering where Leon is. I am the elected supervisor there and on the executive committee of the EI- ISAC, and the EAC’s [U.S. Election Assistance Commission] local leadership council.
Brianna Lennon: I am, also.
Mark Earley: Yes.
Paul Lux: Eric, you're the odd man out for you're not on the EI-ISAC anywhere —
Brianna Lennon: But he is on the steering committee for PLEJ.
Paul Lux: Well, there you go.
Mark Earley: Very good. That's good.
Brianna Lennon: So, we're all important in our own way.
Eric Fey: We’re so important.
Laughter
Brianna Lennon: Thank you for talking with us today on this very Florida centric episode. We always start out, our first question for our guest is about how you all got started in elections. So, whoever wants to take it first, but just give a little bit about your history and how you ended up working as an elections administrator?
Paul Lux: Well, I'll go first because I've heard Mark's story and lived part of it. I started in elections in January of 1999, so since we are on a Florida-centric episode, just to remind everyone that was — yes, put me in the office just in time for the 2000 election in Florida, which everybody remembers for all the wrong reasons. But I was actually a computer guy working in a real estate company, and there was a vacancy, and our secretary knew someone in the elections office, and they were like, “Man, if that guy is as good a computer guy as you say is, he needs to apply for this job,” and so, computers are a hobby that became a job that ended up putting me in this career. When my predecessor retired at the end of 2008, my options were run and become Supervisor of Elections myself — we are an elected position in Florida — or sit there and be number two for whoever takes the job and doesn't know anything about it. So, I opted for option one, and was successful, and I've been serving as the supervisor since 2009.
Mark Earley: Yeah, so I think most people don't ever endeavor to join elections. My story is kind of a mixed story. I started, I was going to school at Cornell in mechanical engineering. I was in Navy ROTC, had scholarships and all that, but I joined a fraternity and probably didn't take school seriously enough. I'm sure the ROTC folks didn't think so — so, I lost my scholarships. After sleeping on my mom's couch for two weeks, she said, “Get your butt up, go find a job.” So I, just by chance, ended up working at the elections warehouse back in 1986. It was September 16th, I believe, 1986. So, I just finished my 39th year in elections, went through the Florida recounts with Paul. [I] worked on the vendor side after that for about six and a half years, and then came back to the county and was — with my predecessor's retirement, I ran for office and was elected in 2016 as the supervisor. So, that's where I've been since then.
Eric Fey: I know in this episode, we want to talk mostly about voter list maintenance stuff, but I have to ask — there aren't a whole lot of folks left from the 2000 Florida elections still in the business, and I'm wondering if there's kind of a special fraternity of you all that, like at a Florida State Conference, when you're at the bar, whatever, you're like, “Oh, man, 2000” and, you know, you kind of reminisce a little bit. Is that a thing?
Paul Lux: Well, I mean, to a certain extent, it is.
Mark Earley: It is.
Paul Lux: And, you are right, the number of us who were around in 2000 is dwindling. I had the added bonus of being the leader of our state association of supervisors of elections during the 2018 triple statewide recount. So, it gave me a very nice bookend to be able to compare the two in real time, as it were, trying to guide our association through that triple statewide recount process, which went way smoother than the 2000 recount did.
Mark Earley: Yeah, and so certainly I was around in the 2000 recounts. We had the dubious distinction or honor of being the receiver of the — for those who remember the news reels — the Ryder rental trucks coming up the Florida Turnpike, they were all coming to the vault I worked in from Palm Beach and Broward counties — and deposited right there in our vault, and so, we were trying to do our recount at the same time of managing all of the millions of ballots from those two jurisdictions.
Paul Lux: And, as an added bonus, I happen to be coming home from taking my then, I think, three-year-old daughter back from Disneyland, and I'm like, “Why are all these news crews there?” And someone's like, “The ballot trucks from Palm Beach are on their way.” And I'm like, “We got to get out of here now.”
Mark Earley: Yes, so we're watching that with trepidation as the SWAT teams infiltrate our offices and set up cameras and there's M16s everywhere, and we're trying to do a recount with national, international implications. It was a crazy time.
The other problem with that is — they don't even go back — when you were in big conferences like this, they say, “How many have been working in elections, you know, this is your first year, five years?” Nobody asked anything beyond, like, 20 years. It's, like, wait now — what about us?
Laughter
Brianna Lennon: So, I think the other element of working in elections for that breadth of time is that you've also seen laws change and different federal changes, different voting equipment, all kinds of things like that. And like Eric said, we wanted to talk a little bit about voter list maintenance today, and as things like the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act have all passed, we're now — shouldn't be a surprise to anybody — focusing on things like citizenship, and just a bigger focus on not just validating that somebody is registered where they're supposed to be and that they are alive, but now also that they meet all of the eligibility requirements that up to this point have been kind of hard to prove, and have been on the honor system. And I know that both of you have had conversations, both with the state and internally, about how incorporating citizenship checks and things like that can be done in Florida.
And, in Missouri — we're very new to it, and don't really have a standardized way of doing it. So, I'm wondering if you can kind of just provide a general overview or introduction into how that works for Florida.
Mark Earley: I would slightly disagree with your initial assumption. I wouldn't say it's the honor system. When — at least in Florida, when people are registering the vote, they're signing an oath, testifying that they are citizens of the United States. There's a checkbox to that effect. So, the implications if they sign that oath and are found not to be citizens are pretty severe. They could be just deported, and so, folks that are — from my experience, the number of registered voters that are not US citizens is extremely small, and it's usually because of a mistake either on the part of the person registering because they didn't understand what they were doing, per se, or even a mistake on the part of the official entering the information not seeing that checkbox checked or not checked as a non-citizen. So, the instances are very small, and that's a little bit more, I think, than the honors.
Paul Lux: And I like to give the example, too, of the first time Florida tried to do this under then Secretary Detzner – would have been going into the 2018 election, I guess, and they generated a list of non-citizens or suspected non-citizens out of the voter rolls, and then they dialed it back and said, “We're just going to send you the the ‘We're pretty sure list.’” So, our initial list had about 150 names on it, and that's out of a jurisdiction that had about 140,000 registered voters. The “very confident” list, for me, had four, just four — two of which were already in the process of being removed because they had not voted. So, clearly, they registered by accident when they got a driver's license. One of them did not have enough data to confirm that it was the person that they thought was in my jurisdiction, and the fourth one, and I don't know if my office is built on an Indian burial mound or something — just a weird, was a guy who was actually of Native American extraction, who was born in Canada, but I know that tribal boundaries that extend beyond international borders. There's this weird quasi-dual citizenship thing between both Mexico and the United States and Canada and the United States. And he was born in Canada, Native American extraction. He was adopted by American parents in Minnesota at the age of, like, seven. So, he grew up with everybody else in the United States, and he ran off and, you know, registered to vote like everybody else's age was doing, and he agreed that he would figure out what his status was and sort it out and come back later. So, I mean, that was the whole list — the very first time that we tried to stop. So, to reinforce Mark's point that “How common is this?” It's not terribly common.
Eric Fey: Maybe just to back up from that a little bit — prior to this citizenship discussion, what tools are available to election offices in Florida, either from the state level, or what you all have just at the county level to maintain your voter list. What do you use right now?
Paul Lux: Well, so, I mean, the Help America Vote Act made all of us create a single statewide voter registration system, of course, and it put that burden, or that onus on the state to be doing things that we could not do. So, will the Social Security Administration grant us access to the social security database to check numbers? No, they will not. They give that only to the states. So, at the local level, we rely on the state to do a lot of those matchings for us. The state — we cannot get access to the DMV database, so the state is required to do the verification of the driver's license that HAVA mandates, as well. And so, almost all of that really comes down from the state to us — the interactions, the scrubbing of the state lists against the FDLE [Florida Department of Law Enforcement] list for recently convicted felons or known convicted felons, that is constantly ongoing. All of those things tie together, but they're almost all state-centric, coming down to us from the state.
Mark Earley: Yeah, and so, prior to some of the citizenship discussions — list maintenance has always been a thing, especially in Florida. A lot of the requirements are set out in an NVRA [The National Voter Registration Act] from the ‘93, ‘94 era.
I wrote the flow chart, it turns out, that we started using back then for the state laws, and so, it's really been baked into our state statutes on how you do that. Some of the different things we use, we look at NCOA data — national change of address data —where people, if they're moving, they file with the post office their new addresses. And so, that's what we scrub against a lot. There are mailings that we do, as required by law — address confirmation notices, address change, final notices, to communicate with the voters, so we don't remove them from the rolls when they shouldn't be.
And that was built into NVRA because, prior to that, there was the “big purge,” and everybody still used the word “purge.” Election rolls don't get “purged” anymore, but we do, it's in our own best interest to do effective list maintenance. So, I think Florida does a great job of that. We are very much on top of that, but the protections for voters are still there, because just not voting is not necessarily a reason to be taken off the rolls — at least without communication. But, having said that, that is another one of the triggers that can make someone go from an active status to an inactive status, and the active status means, “Yes, we're you're communicating with the elections office in some form” every two, at least every two major election cycles, by voting, by signing petitions, by doing address changes, party changes, whatever the kind of transaction with our office, we record that, and that maintains your activity level, even if you're not voting, signing petitions or just keeping your registration status current is enough to keep you as an active voter.
You become inactive if some of those things don't happen within two election cycles, and then we are required to reach out to you. There's a fairly recent law change, I guess, three or four legislative cycles ago, where our final notice there is a 30-day requirement to correspond back to us. It used to be if we would send out these notices asking for updates and letting people know they're about to go inactive. No response didn't make you inactive, and so, we did have some dead wood in our voter rolls, which actually for us, made our turnout percentages decrease, which we don't like to see. So, we implemented, in state statute, a requirement that they have to reach back out, they have to respond within 30 days of that final notice. If they don't respond, then they go inactive automatically, but still any activity after that — just a simple phone call to our office makes you active again.
[High Turnout Wide Margins Midbreak]
Eric Fey: Since, I think Florida sounds to me like maybe a little bit further along in this than most other states, since you guys are already exploring MOAs [Memorandum of Agreement] with the, I guess, the Department of Homeland Security, or, I don't know who exactly, US-CIS.
Paul Lux: I think it's Homeland Security.
Eric Fey: Yeah, anyway, I guess it matters not for this discussion, but has there been any talk in your state association about the best way to effectuate this? Or has the Secretary of State's office in Florida kind of sent guidance to you all? It sounds like maybe not, but what's going on in that regard?
Paul Lux: It has been a bit of a bit of a black hole, and it's still so new. I mean, we only, our state association meets twice a year. So, as of our last meeting, we hadn't even really opened this can of worms up because, I think, that that executive order was still really fresh ink at that time, and so, we've got another conference coming up in a couple of weeks — in December, early December this year — I imagine that will be one of the major topics of discussion there, as people are still trying to figure this out.
Mark Earley: Yeah, I think that's accurate. We're still very early in the process, and, frankly, there's so many other topics that we're trying to keep abreast of and deal with. We've got a lot of work groups right now working on other very important things.
Brianna Lennon: I think the way that you phrase that —
Paul Lux: It’s almost like he's a politician, isn’t it.
Laughter
Brianna Lennon: No, no, no. The way that you phrased that made me think, like, on the scale of things that everybody's preparing for — for midterm elections — and having to now incorporate that, how has that impacted the work that you've been doing? Has this caused you to have to, like, pick and choose priorities?
Paul Lux: Well, I can say that probably my biggest concern with the whole SAVE thing with the citizenship, of course — one of the allegations from the 2020 election was that, you know, 1000s and 1000s of non citizens voted, particularly in Arizona, which, for the record, was the only state at that time who had a requirement to prove citizenship in order to register to vote, — except not for federal elections, right? So, they have to run this bifurcated database of federal only election people versus non-federal only election people, and, to me, the potential nightmare for that reality is what keeps me up at night because managing one voter registration list is bad enough. Trying to bifurcate that into a magic database of people who registered using the federal form and are only allowed to have a ballot with federal races on it is just a nightmare scenario. I mean, you have jurisdictions like Miami who already have 7, 8, 900 ballot styles — triple that number in a primary, and now, we're going to add this layer to this. I mean, it just asks for mistakes to be made in a huge, huge way, and that's probably my biggest concern with how this is going to start rolling out.
Mark Earley: Yeah, we're like, say we're still early in this process, but I'm concerned that the state legislature's reaction to the executive order and trying to implement some of those is going to lead to the unintended consequences of making elections much more difficult to administer, and just lead to a lot more mistakes.
In 2011, there were some well intended election laws passed, and, in 2012, the first major election, there were lines out there in some of our bigger counties till, you know, after midnight, of people trying to vote on Election Day. So, I'm hoping that we, our association of election officials, will continue to have a good rapport or partnership, or, you know, be asked for guidance on what some of the implications of proposed legislation may do to the ability to administer elections. But yeah, going to two separate databases — that's a nightmare scenario. This stuff cannot happen overnight, and it needs to be done very carefully.
Eric Fey: Well, I think you guys are alluding to what my next question, and that's, and this is maybe kind of a philosophical question — is the juice worth the squeeze with this whole thing ?
Mark Earley: No.
Laughter
Eric Fey: Okay, I mean, so you cut right to it. The part of that I struggle with a little bit is that intangible of confidence in elections, you know, some voters or some elected officials, potentially, would have greater confidence in elections if we could somehow use this whole list matching and prove how many non-citizens were or weren't on the rolls. But, you know, Paul, you already described in your case, last time the state did it with you, you could literally count on one hand the number of people that were actually in that questionable category. So, I mean, Mark, you already answered this question — but is it worth it?
Paul Lux: Well, I would say, too, that it really comes down to Florida was an early implementer of the REAL ID, and so, when I'm having this conversation with community leaders and community members, you know, inevitably, when that question comes up, I say, “Look,” you know, “how many of you renewed your driver's license recently, right? Show of hands.”
“Okay, what did you have to bring?”
“Well, I had to bring my birth certificate because I got married. I had to bring my marriage license. I got divorced three times and married three times — I had to bring all of those things.”
I said, “We've been doing that for a long time.” So, you're literally talking about the universe of people who are registering on a piece of paper somewhere — not the 1000s and 1000s of people that are going through the DMV office, because in the DMV office, they're coming through and they're having to show an original birth certificate. Regardless of what country you're born in, you have to show an original birth certificate, and the software they're using, unless you accompany that foreign birth certificate with a certificate of naturalization, doesn't even lead to the voter registration part of their software anymore. So, it's, I don't want to say impossible because that's a bad word, but it's highly unlikely that they are slipping through that way. So, you're literally talking about the pool of people who are just registering using a piece of paper, checking the box that says “Yes, I'm a US citizen,’ and lying when they sign the oath at the bottom, and that cannot be a huge universe of people.
Mark Earley: And facing deportation if they sign that oath improperly.
And you asked about confidence — the emails I'm getting on this are concerned citizens who are citizens either afraid that they may be taken off the rolls, especially some of the more elderly folks who don't necessarily have a birth certificate or what have you, or just folks that are very worried that we are going to be sending their important data, like driver's license numbers and social security numbers, up to the federal government when they registered with the understanding that we that was a private thing. So, I am somewhat concerned that there's more of a confidence or trust gap if we follow through into this with those who are out there as real US citizens, but are very concerned that they're gonna be they're gonna get on some other list that they have to worry about.
Brianna Lennon: So, this kind of goes back to an earlier question, but in those instances — what do you do? If you had an instance where the SAVE database came back and said, “Yeah, that guy's questionable.” What actions do you take in your office to do that? Because there are no standard operating procedures.
Paul Lux: I hate to say the typical political answer, which is — it'll depend. But, as with that first list of felons that I mentioned, all the way back in 2018, it was very hard. There were supervisors, and I won't name anybody out, but there was a supervisor who simply took the list and just removed everybody — boop, they're all off the rolls, and we were all like, “No, it was meant to be a starting point, not a just take them all off the rolls.” And so, you know, it's our job, it's incumbent on us — the local election official, to do our due diligence to make sure that we're not removing people who are perfectly eligible to vote.
Mark Earley: . Yeah, and we're getting some of that information, and we have been for years, frankly, from the state. But really, that falls into the eligibility review category, and we have state statutes 98 — it's either 98.075 or 065. I get them both mixed up. One's list maintenance. The other is eligibility — but there are procedures we have to follow before we just take somebody off the rolls. So, there's always communication. And so, there's been some informal discussions on how we do that, and there's a little bit of precedence already set that this kind of falls under the eligibility statutes. So, yeah, you shouldn't just take someone off the rolls at the drop of a hat because it looks like there might be a match potentially. You have to really research that very carefully.
Brianna Lennon: So, and the reason why I bring that up is because, I think, if Missouri is an example of it — not every state is as lucky as Florida to have that kind of laid out, and so, for these states that are having the conversation, and we hear at the state level that, “Oh, well, we're going to start using SAVE data” and there is no communication about what locals should be doing once they get that information — I wonder what you all think about how that perception is going. I mean, you've already heard from voters, if people start saying, “Well, don't worry, we check your data against SAVE data.” Then, you are liable for the judgment call that you make for not taking somebody off if they pop on SAVE data, and you have no protection to say, “Yeah, I made that call or I feel like they are citizens.” Even though the SAVE database says maybe they're not.
Paul Lux: Well, and not to put anyone's job in jeopardy — my own, particularly, you know, I'm elected by my constituents. Now, that doesn't mean that if I break laws, the governor cannot remove me. But I can also tell you that Florida, very specifically, has built into the law that the final arbiter of who is and is not a registered voter in the county's jurisdiction is the county election official. So, the state can say, “You should remove this person.” If I look at the data and I don't think it matches, I have the wherewithal to say “I don't think this person needs to be removed.”
Mark Earley: And that's certainly happened quite, I think in most counties. We've had information that suggested maybe from somebody at a different level than us, and I've absolutely not acted on it. There was a felons list that came out, you know, in the aughts sometime around then, or maybe it's 2012 or 2010, and it was very much — had a lot of erroneous data, just like the database that came out in 2018 — and so, we looked at that, we found a lot of problems with that, with both lists. And so, I didn't act on anybody on either list, because I determined — and as it states in law, you know, there has to be credible and reliable information — I found both those lists to be not credible nor reliable. So, I did not go in them at all well.
Paul Lux: And not only that, Florida went a step further at our behest, actually. Thanks to the legislature for stepping in. Because, after 2020, we were getting all of the amateur data comparers who were, you know, burying us with emails of lists of people to check and remove from the database because “These people shouldn't be voting,” and Florida actually changed the law to say that we had to get those lists from — How did they phrase it?
Mark Earley: An official government agency.
Paul Lux: From an official government agency. Prior to that, it said you should act on any information that you receive. They changed that to because of the credible — and I mean, and one of the first lists I'm looking at, I'm like, you know, half of these people aren't even my registered voters. So, how can I trust any of the data in your list when the list you've given me isn't even accurate to who is or isn't one of my registered voters? And so, the state did step in and say, “Yeah, this needs to actually come down to you from us,” which is very helpful, instead of having to act on everything that comes across the desk.
Mark Earley: And they recognize that even if we get it from the state —it's still our final decision of whether we take them off or not because, you know, the state can get inundated too. We've had third parties send the data to the state, and then the state sends it to us, and it's not coming from the state, and they've so far been very good about saying, “This is not our data. We've got it. You know, kind of spot check it, or what have you. And if you find something actionable, then go ahead and take action.”
And I've received data directly from third parties, and we spot checked it, usually, and sometimes it's very credible, and I've actually removed some voters from the rolls after the communication requirements and all of that, the eligibility review process, based on some of that data, but it's very few and far between when that's ever happened.
Eric Fey: You've been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local elections administration. I'm your host, Eric Fey, alongside Brianna Lennon. A big thanks to KBIA and the Election Center for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. Our Associate Producer is Katie Quinn, and our Digital Producer is Mark Johnson. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.
