Protecting Your Florida Long-Term Care Facility During Elections—Part 2

Once residential directors have identified any facility vulnerabilities, it is important to implement policies and procedures to protect the residents, staff, and facility. It is crucial to educate staff on state and federal voting laws, as well as criminal penalties for vote fraud. Directors can be held responsible for staff failure to comply with the law.

Long-term care facility directors are responsible for:

• Properly following ballot assistance laws.
• Knowing which residents are “non compos mentis” and ensuring state and federal voting laws are followed for these individuals. Staff should not mark ballots for residents who cannot express their wish to vote in the election or freely express their preferred candidate.
• Enacting protocols to protect residents from possible vote suppression and fraud.
• Teaching staff that it is never “ok” to tell a resident for whom to vote.
• Protecting staff from outside groups that offer financial compensation for ballot trafficking.
• Creating systems – which are carefully monitored– to protect the chain of custody of ballots.
• Discussing with staff how to protect absentee ballots from ballot harvesters/traffickers and create systems to protect your residents’ ballots to ensure they securely get to the election authorities.
• Establishing training programs to teach staff what constitutes vote suppression and fraud and create policies to prevent these crimes at your facility.

Long-term care facilities have an important role in protecting voting rights. Only with continued strong leadership will the residents, staff, and facility be safe from actions, whether inadvertent or deliberate, that violate state and federal laws.

 A helpful legal guide can be requested (at no cost) by emailing Laura.Williams@centerforvulnerablevoters.org. Additional training materials are available at www.centerforvulnerablevoters.org and the Center also provides in-person training upon request.

Disclaimer: This information is being provided for educational purposes and should not be construed as legal advice. You should always consult an attorney before taking action to ensure that recent changes in law have not altered your obligations.