A Florida elections official who stoked a national debate by removing a polling site from a local mosque over complaints from a contingent of angry residents overwhelmingly defeated her tea party challenger on Tuesday.
Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher earned 77 percent of the vote compared to 23 percent for former Broward County GOP chair Christine Spain, winning a third term in office by a landslide.
While the elections supervisor role is non-partisan, a decidedly political issue ended up roiling the race in the middle of the summer.
Bucher selected the Islamic Center of Boca Raton to serve as a polling site this spring, making it the first mosque to join the more than 90 churches and five synagogues that host voters on Election Day in Palm Beach County.
When voters learned in July that they would cast their votes at a mosque, around 50 mostly anonymous residents in the overwhelmingly Democratic district left furious voicemails and emails at Bucher’s office saying they felt “uncomfortable” voting in an Islamic house of worship.
Bucher removed the poll site from the mosque and relocated it to a local library, to the chagrin of mosque leaders and local clergy who accused the former Democratic legislator of caving to anti-Islamic bigotry. Spain seized on the issue as an example of Bucher’s “poor judgment,” accusing the Islamic Center’s president of espousing “Sharia law.”
“Why should people be put in harms way or feel uncomfortable or insecure or who knows what in this day and age?” Spain told TPM in a July interview. “Why even invite the risk?”
Bucher kept quiet during the fallout and earned the endorsement of the Sun Sentinel newspaper earlier this month.
“I’m very pleased that the voters have the confidence to elect me for another term,” Bucher told the newspaper after her win. “We have demonstrated that … we are organized and can produce an election like the voters expect us to.”
