Republican SOE challenger Billy Christensen and Democratic incumbent SOE Craig Latimer at the Tampa Tiger Bay Club on Sept. 20, 2024. (Photo by Don Kruse for the Florida Phoenix)
Many of the Republican candidates in Florida challenging incumbent supervisors of elections on “voter integrity” issues fell short in the August primary, but a few such candidates are still very much alive electorally going into next month’s general election.
One of those contests in taking place in Hillsborough County, where 12-year Democratic incumbent Craig Latimer faces his most energetic opponent since taking office in Republican former U.S. Air Force analyst Billy Christensen.
Latimer has raised more than five times as much campaign cash and has the backing of the political establishment in the county, much of which remains with the Democratic Party.
But the county has turned dramatically redder in recent years, giving no Democratic incumbent a free ride going into next month’s general election. There were some 5,000+ more registered Democrats than Republicans in the district as of earlier this week, according to the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections office. Compare that to four years ago, when there were 73,361 more registered Democrats than Republicans ahead of election day.
Christensen is a real estate agent from east Hillsborough County who served for nine years in the U.S. Air Force as an intelligence analyst and an additional nine years as a civilian employee at U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. He says he has the skills to become the next supervisor of elections in Hillsborough in part because he managed $3.5 billion in “urgent warfare needs” with a staff of 5,000 people.
While many of the candidates running this year in Florida for supervisor of elections were inspired by what they insist was a corrupt election system that cost Donald Trump the presidency in 2020, Chamberlain says his inspiration is more personal, citing the data hack that took place at the Hillsborough County’s SOE office in May 2023, which exposed private information of approximately 58,000 county voters — one of them his wife.
“Unfortunately, since that announcement, there hasn’t been a single update,” Christensen recently said. “Mr. Latimer hides behind this ongoing 16-month FBI investigation.” Although incidents like this can happen, he added, “the lack of response to the community is the troubling part here.”
Latimer says it was “a bad actor who was able to gain access” to the voting system and illegally accessed files on a shared drive on the office’s network. He has emphasized that the unauthorized user “did not have access to our voter registration system or our ballot tabulation system.”
Christensen retorts that the FBI “does not withhold information for 16 months for a routine cyberhack,” speculating there must be either foreign intelligence element or an organized crime element “or both.”
Billy Christensen speaking with other GOP supervisor of election candidates in Clearwater on April 24, 2024 (Photo by Mitch Perry/ Florida Phoenix)
Additional complaints
That data hack is just one of a bill of particulars that Chamberlain has amassed to conclude that the office isn’t being run efficiently — although Latimer has been aggressive in firing back at such claims.
Take the notion that Latimer let down the public in August on primary election night by not immediately posting returns after the polls closed at 7 p.m. Eastern Time. Floridians seeking updates up and down the state — not just in Hillsborough — were unable to access data from county websites that evening.
But the problem wasn’t with Latimer’s office but with the vendor that administers supervisor of elections websites throughout the state, which all suffered crashes that evening.
“All of the customers websites that we host were impacted and we take full responsibility,” said Ben Martin, vendor VR Systems’ chief operating officer, in a statement the day after the Florida primary.
“The websites were down as we took steps to correct issues that were caused by logging that was enabled as a security measure on the sites. Once we resolved this, all of the sites were restored.” Martin added that to ensure that the problem doesn’t happen in the future his company is working with “external technical experts to help in optimizing their system.”
(A similar problem occurred Monday, the first day of early voting in 51 counties. In a bit of irony, the VR Systems’ “News and Events” web page where the company post statements was down on Tuesday morning).
‘Zuckerbucks’
Another problem that conservatives in Florida and across the country have gone ballistic over is the perception there was something profoundly unfair when two election organizations distributed grants to local supervisor of elections offices that came from Meta head Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan in 2020.
The charge was that the funding — dubbed “Zuckerbucks” — went only to Democratic-leaning counties and that the money was used more for get-out-the-vote-efforts and not just to promote “safe and reliable voting,” the original reason Zuckerberg and Chan said the money was for.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Hillsborough County received $2.93 million from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, an organization funded by Zuckerberg and Chan, distributed to participating counties during the coronavirus pandemic.
Latimer spent the money on an extensive voter education campaign leading to the 2020 election. That consisted of television ads in both English and Spanish over cable and streaming services and in publications like the Tampa Bay Times, the Tampa Bay Business Journal, and Creative Loafing; on websites like ESPN, Yahoo, FoxNews.com; through local radio hosts and sponsorships of traffic and weather segments on multiple stations; and on digital billboards, in-person visits at places like the University of South Florida, the University of Tampa, and in Ybor City.
There also were social media hits and displays at airports, convenience stores, and gas stations. In an “After-Action” report, Latimer said it was worth it, as voter turnout increased (from 72% to 77%).
“We’ve clearly been up front and transparent about how this money was spent,” Latimer said, noting that then-Florida Republican Secretary of State Laurel Lee notified every SOE in the state that this grant money was available.
Zuckerberg provided a separate $60 million to the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR) to individual states.
“We made it available to every single state,” said David Becker, executive director for CEIR, adding that election officials from 23 states applied for that funding.
“And every single one of them got the money that they requested,” he said on a national Zoom call last month. “And they had to use it for nonpartisan voter education. That was the requirement. Importantly, the state of Florida under Gov. DeSantis and-then Secretary of State Laurel Lee was one of those 23 states.”
Records show that Florida received a grant of more than $287,000 in 2020 from the group. In August 2022, a bipartisan group of Federal Election Commissioners (FEC) dismissed allegations the funding had violated the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971.
“The bottom line to this is, this was money well spent,” an unrepentant Latimer said. “In 2020, we had the highest turnout for a presidential election that we ever had, and I will remind you that it was during a pandemic.”
Craig Latimer at WMNF Radio in Tampa on Oct. 4, 2024. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix)
‘Incredibly well-respected nationwide’
Latimer, 72, is a retired major with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office who has led the supervisor of elections office since 2012 — the last time he faced a GOP opponent.
“I can tell you without saying anything about the election that’s upcoming, he is incredibly well respected amongst his fellow election supervisors in the state of Florida — Republicans as well as Democrats — and incredibly well respected nationwide on a ton of issues,” said Becker, now a consultant for CBS News.
“He’s one of the most knowledgeable election supervisors in the country, and so if he needed resources … then he served his voters by taking what he needed.”
While many of his cohorts who have attempted to take on incumbent election supervisors this year adamantly believe that Donald Trump was unfairly denied the presidency in 2020, Chamberlain, 44, calls such questions “divisive.”
“President Biden obviously won the election,” he said during a Tampa Tiger Bay meeting in September. “We need to move on. I’m focused on fixing the issues locally here in our administration.”
He does have a problem with the fact that Florida is one of only 11 states that doesn’t elect their state elections heads — Cord Byrd has served as Florida’s Secretary of State since 2021, appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. “We have 67 SOE’s taking guidance from our unelected Secretary of State,” Chamberlain said. “I think that is inherently challenging for our state and needs to get fixed.”
Christensen’s platform includes boosting voter education efforts. He wants to “leverage DeSantis’ 2021 civic education initiative to implement an online voter education program in Hillsborough schools, which he argues “would give us metrics and measurables which we would bring to the people in our quarterly town halls to show us whether we’re failing or succeeding and where we need to improve.”
Jake Hoffman, executive director of the Tampa Bay Young Republicans, supports Christensen.
“I have my concerns over the Hillsborough SOE, particularly in regard to cyber security and partisan distribution of Zuckerbucks in 2020,” he told the Phoenix in an email. “As I’m sure you’re aware, they’re still under FBI investigation for data breach that we’ve learned little about. Additionally, I’ve spoken to Craig a few times about my concerns after the Crowdstrike global tech outage and what protections we’ve taken in Hillsborough.”
Thorn in his side
Christensen has been a thorn in Latimer’s side for some time now. The GOP challenger has made more than 40 public information requests to Latimer’s office, something that “election integrity” activists take pride in, with some supervisors of elections nationwide complaining of the “weaponization” of public records requests.
Latimer confirmed that such public information requests have “increased greatly” for his office, and says some of the ones that his opponent has requested “are kind of frivolous.”
“He doesn’t understand the elections process. He wants to jump to conclusions about things — I guess he thinks he’s an investigator or something, I’m not really sure. He’ll ask for things over a 12-year period and we give him, ‘Here’s what it’s going to cost to do it,’ he just throws his hands up and says that I’m trying to obstruct things, and I’m not, I’m trying to follow the law. If you make an onerous request, by law you have to pay for that.”
Christensen said he has filed “fundamental organization requests,” including for a staff organizational chart. He claims Latimer charges excessive amounts for public record requests, which Latimer denies.
The eventual winner may face a hostile county commission. In a somewhat shocking move, the board, which flipped from blue to red in 2022, voted 4-3 last March to cut the election’s already approved budget by $200,000 because of what was perceived by one commissioner as a “historic” drop in active registered voters.
The candidates do agree on a few things — such as not showing immediate support for Ron DeSantis’ Office of Election Crimes and Security for investigating allegedly fraudulent signatures that helped put the abortion-rights constitutional amendment on the ballot.
“It’s curious that that’s the focus to go investigate the signatures,” said Christensen. “Because I believe, quite frankly, that there are more pressing issues in our office. Cybersecurity, accountability, etc.”
Latimer said it was “totally unprecedented” to be called to produce petitions when his office had already verified the signatures of the petition signers. “I was a little bit stunned that we got this request for 6,000 petitions. It was just in two specific congressional districts, and it was probably a hundred different petition gatherers that had submitted those petitions. It was very unusual,” he says.