Followers of Donald Trump are pursuing an unusually coordinated effort to capture local election offices in his home state of Florida. Still motivated by his false claims of widespread voter fraud, they have formed a slate of self-described “America First” candidates and they’re running this year to take over as their county’s supervisor of elections for the four coming years.
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, though the final result is pending a recount.
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.