Lori Edwards happily recalls her first day in a civics class as a seventh-grader at Sarasota Junior High School.
“It was like the lights came on, and I have had a passion for our democratic process, including our legislative process, just the whole government, ever since,” Edwards said. “And I consider myself blessed in that way, because so many people have to kind of find what their thing is. This found me when I was, like, 12.”
For the past 24 years, Edwards has played an integral role in the democratic process as Polk County supervisor of elections. After conducting more than 200 elections, Edwards will leave office on Jan. 6, having lost her bid in November for a seventh term.
Melony Bell, a Republican and former state representative, gained 53.9% of the vote to 46.1% for Edwards, who ran as a no-party candidate.
Edwards, 67, is tied with Polk County Property Appraiser Marsha Faux for second in longevity among the county’s constitutional officers. Faux is also leaving office after deciding not to seek another term. Tax Collector Joe Tedder has been in office since 1997.
Edwards, a New Jersey native who spent most of her childhood in Sarasota, worked in radio as a disk jockey and then a news reporter before serving in the Florida House as a Democrat from 1992 to 2000. She first attained election as supervisor of elections in 2000, the year of a historic presidential election that took weeks to decide and hinged on the contested results from Florida.
That election spurred a series of changes that have inflected Edwards’ 24 years as Polk County’s top election official.
The 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore marked the first time in recent history that the average American paid close attention to the details of how elections are conducted, Edwards said. The contest drew often-embarrassing scrutiny for Florida, as media coverage focused on flaws with punch-card ballots used in some counties.
In the aftermath, the Florida Legislature adopted a package of bills intended to improve elections systems in the state.
“If I had to pick one thing out of those changes that I think had the biggest impact on elections, it would be the requirement of provisional ballots,” Edwards said. “There were no provisional ballots before, and so if somebody came in to vote and the person working there either made an honest human error, or there was a clerical error, or even if for whatever if their eligibility was in question, the person at the front line had the right to say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not eligible.’”
Current law allows a voter to cast a provisional ballot, which will only be counted if the person’s identity and eligibility are confirmed. That relieves poll workers from having to make instant decisions, Edwards said. In the November general election, voters cast 1,456 provisional ballots in Polk County.
Edwards has taken several steps to upgrade election equipment in the office. She cited the adoption of high-speed ballot scanners as a great improvement.
“As recently as 2015 here in Polk County, we were feeding every single vote-by-mail ballot into a scanner like this,” Edwards said, indicating insertion by hand. “And generally, there’s around 100,000 vote-by-mail ballots. So just hours and hours of this. And so now those high-speed scanners have really made much easier work of it.”
Electronic poll books have also streamlined the process, Edwards said. The devices allow real-time communication between voting sites and the elections office.
“That’s a big factor in preventing fraud,” Edwards said. “So, for instance, if you mailed in or dropped off a mail ballot and we received it on a Thursday morning, and then Thursday noontime you went to an early voting site to try to vote, when you tried to vote, we would already see that your mail ballot was returned.”
Edwards decries partisan change
Polk County voters adopted a charter provision in the 1990s specifying that elections for constitutional officers — such as sheriff, elections supervisor and clerk of courts — should be nonpartisan. Earlier this year, though, the Florida Department of State ordered Edwards to run the races as partisan contests, citing a Florida Supreme Court ruling from 2019.
Bell received enthusiastic support from Polk County Republicans and conservative groups and garnered endorsements from Republican elected officials, including Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio. Edwards ran as a nonpartisan candidate.
“I feel strongly that this should be a nonpartisan office,” Edwards said. “I think that the Supervisor of Elections Office needs to project neutrality at all times. And I don’t think the partisan nature of the 2024 campaign, as well as the fact that it’s a partisan office, is helping anything.”
Lori Edwards, right, and Christine Goding do a run-through of the phone bank for poll worker assistance at the Supervisor of Elections Office in 2004.
Edwards, a former Democrat, said her office receives calls from both Republicans and Democrats convinced that their complaint, such as a voter registration glitch, reflects partisan animosity.
Through her six terms in office, Edwards gained statewide prominence, serving as president of the Florida Supervisors of Elections from 2013 to 2014. She holds a certification from the National Association of Election Officials and sits on the boards of the MIT Election Data Science Lab and the Bipartisan Policy Center, based in Washington, D.C.
“As a fellow supervisor of elections, I have had the privilege of witnessing the dedication and commitment that Supervisor Edwards has to administering elections and the voters of Polk County,” Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections Ron Turner said by email. “Lori’s leadership and experience has made a difference for her community over her six terms in office and has been a valuable asset for her colleagues in the FSE.”
Troubled by election doubts
Edwards’ tenure as Supervisor of Elections has overlapped with a period of rising doubts among some Americans about the soundness and reliability of elections. That trend has been fueled by President-elect Donald Trump’s repeated and unsupported claims that the 2020 election, which he lost, was fraudulent.
“I feel very, very confident,” Edwards said. “We have multi-layered security for all of our systems. Our systems have been thoroughly tested and vetted by the Florida Department of State before we’re even allowed to use them. They are under scrutiny 24 hours, with cameras, at all times. They are well tested before each election. And then we do post-election audits.”
Edwards addressed various concerns that some voters might have about the potential for errors or outright fraud. On claims that non-citizens cast ballots, she noted that anyone registering to vote must undergo verification of a Social Security number and a driver’s license.
Citizens occasionally attempt to vote in person after casting a vote by mail, but Edwards said that typically results from confusion rather than sinister intent.
“The one thing that I think is without a doubt untrue is, there seems to be this concept out there, or the belief, that there is some type of an organized fraud attempt,” Edwards said. “I have never seen even the slightest hint of any organized attempt.”
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Claims persist that electronic voting systems, such as those used in Polk County, are vulnerable to hacking and the alteration of vote counts. Polk County Commissioner Bill Braswell, in a September interview with a Ledger reporter, declared that “an internet connected voting machine can be hacked.”
Edwards said that is not true. Tabulation machines are only connected to the internet for a brief period on election night to transmit unofficial vote totals from precincts to the operations center, she said. The system has a firewall feature, blocking unauthorized access to a computer at the election operations center. That computer is set to only perform the necessary functions required to receive the encrypted data, Edwards said.
“The equipment doesn’t even have the capacity, the actual equipment in the precincts, to accept information,” Edwards said. “It only has the capacity to send.”
Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards hands out the totals to Lake Wales Mayor Jack Hilligoss and other members of the Lake Wales Canvass Board during a machine recount of the Lake Wales ballots at the Polk Supervisor of Elections Office in Winter Haven on April 5, 2024.
Despite those and other explanations provided by Edwards and her colleagues, confidence in elections has declined among Americans, with registered Republicans more likely to harbor doubts, according to the Pew Research Center.
“It’s bothersome if people are losing confidence in the process, because truly, at the bottom of our electoral process, everything relies on people’s confidence in that process,” Edwards said. “So, as somebody who has kind of dedicated their life to it, I can be concerned if confidence is eroding. On the other hand, my real-world experience is most people that I talk to trust the system.”
Since the 2020 election, there have been news reports of election officials and workers receiving threats. Though her office sometimes fields phone calls from voters angry about registration or balloting issues, Edwards said that she and her staff have not endured any threats.
Will miss election fervor
The operations center in Winter Haven, where Edwards has her office, was eerily quiet on a recent morning. But Edwards said the department remains busy throughout the year, other than the final few weeks.
Though some voters only pay attention to presidential elections, county officers administer municipal elections in April, which sometimes produce runoff races. Gubernatorial and congressional elections take place between presidential years. The office begins gearing up for elections 90 days in advance.
Aside from overseeing elections, the office handles voter registrations, requests for mail ballots and other tasks.
“It’s nothing to have 1,000 transactions a week here in Polk County for voter registration, and that can go up to 10,000 or 11,000 as you get close to a big election,” Edwards said. “And then, on top of that, what happens is you’re doing list maintenance all the time, so that creates a lot of work.”
Even after 24 years, Edwards said she still found stimulation in running elections.
“I live for the pace that elections provide,” she said. “I truly do. Election Day is my favorite holiday. The election season — it gives me energy. As demanding as it is, it actually provides energy to me.”
Among her chief accomplishments, Edwards mentions creating an Outreach and Education Department in the office.
“We don’t consider our work to just occur inside the building,” she said. “We’re always doing our best to reach out to where the people are for voter education, voter outreach. We do more than 200 events a year, and so that keeps us busy, too.”
After leaving office, Edwards hopes to do more traveling, continuing a quest to visit all of the presidential libraries and taking a flight out of Lakeland Linder International Airport to one of Avelo’s destinations. But she also talked of continued public service.
“I’m going to certainly try to learn how to relax a little bit, and certainly I hope to do some more travel,” she said. “But ultimately, in the long haul, what I want to do is find a way to give back to this community. I’m not sure exactly how, but I love Polk County, and I just know that I’ll find a way to contribute and help where it’s needed.”
Gary White can be reached at [email protected] or 863-802-7518. Follow on X @garywhite13.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Polk election supervisor departs after 24 years of significant change
