- This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St.

Petersburg, Sarasota.

[music] - Coming up, two federal courts, two opposite orders, so who gets the last word on how Florida checks the citizenship of its voters?

The question hangs over an election already underway.

More than a million mail ballots are on their way to voters for next month's primary.

New census numbers show the Great Florida migration is slowing to a fraction of its peak.

So why have Hillsborough and Pinellas started losing residents to the rest of the country, and where are Floridians going instead?

Who decides what counts as a terrorist organization, and what proof should it take?

Florida's new designation law puts those questions in front of a federal judge.

Those stories and more of the week's current affairs are next on Florida This Week.

[music] Welcome back, everybody.

I'm Lissette Campos.

Joining us on the panel today is Christopher Ingram.

He spent two decades inside Republican campaigns and is one of Tampa Bay's most familiar political analysts.

He now runs Gulfstream Video Studio in Pinellas Park and is a former adjunct professor at the University of Tampa.

We have Mitch Perry, senior reporter for the Florida Phoenix.

He spent 20 years covering Florida's current affairs, including original reporting on one of the stories you'll hear more about today.

And Cesar Hernandez is the founder of Tampa's Omni Public and of Omni X, that's a civic AI venture at Harvard and MIT.

He learned this town from the inside at City Council and at the region's transit agency, and he brings the Democratic view.

We begin with two stories about your ballot.

A federal judge in Florida has ordered Washington to keep giving the state a powerful tool for checking the citizenship of registered voters.

It goes against another judge's ruling that says that same tool could get eligible voters kicked off the rolls.

All of this happening as more than a million mail ballots start arriving in Florida mailboxes ahead of the primary.

The database is called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement Program, also known as SAVE.

It's a federal system holding Social Security numbers and citizenship records on people nationwide.

Florida uses it to check whether registered voters are U.S.

citizens.

Last month, a federal judge in Washington shut that effort down, warning eligible voters could be wrongly purged.

But this month, a Pensacola judge pushed back, ordering Homeland Security to keep the data flowing to Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio.

Two courts, two opposite rulings.

And Florida is at the center because our state brought the case to court first.

Supporters call the checks common sense.

Critics who sued say the data is unreliable and legitimate voters could pay the price.

It's worth noting that voting by non-citizens is already a crime, and documented cases are actually rare.

The rulings come at a pivotal time when voting in the August 18th primary is effectively underway.

More than 1.1 million Floridians have requested mail-in ballots.

County election offices face a deadline this week to send them, and the first ballots from overseas voters are already coming back.

Monday, July the 20th, is the last day to register to vote or change your party affiliation.

Important because of Florida's closed primary, voters can only select from the candidates in the same party they are registered with.

Requests for mail-in ballots closes on August the 6th.

And Chris, there are so many aspects of this that bring about questions.

The SAVE database is not new.

However, it was revamped right.

The searchability of it has been changed.

And so why do these two federal cases, why are they so important for voters to know about?

Well, I think what the important thing is, is that Florida using this database is helping to ensure the integrity of voting in the state of Florida.

And of course, President Trump has tried to do a lot of things by executive order that have been overturned by the courts because it's a state right issue to handle voting.

However, the accessibility of this database to the states.

The question I ask is, why aren't more states doing this to cross-check and to make sure that the voter rolls are consistent with people who are only legally here, who are American citizens, and that, in fact, have the right to vote.

Because anytime somebody that votes that is not a legal voter, they are unduly influencing in a negative way, everyone else's vote because it dilutes it in one way or another.

And so I just think that this is a really great thing.

I'm happy to see Florida being at the forefront of this and that governor DeSantis and the other states are using it.

And we'll continue to see this go through the courts, because this is not going to go away with these lower court rulings.

This will probably go to the Supreme Court, because there are so many different parties on both sides of the aisle that are involved.

- These are Democratic officials have come out strongly against it.

This and they have pointed out that only four states are using it Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio, to check the citizenship of registered voters.

Um, what do you how do Democratic advocates feel about this?

- Well, I mean, I'll discuss what Democratic advocates, uh, talk about, but beyond that, just the current vulnerabilities of it that any American, regardless of Republican or Democrat, should know.

Um, this brings up a huge tension, right?

And that tension is we want to make sure that people can vote and people that are eligible to vote do vote.

The challenge is twofold.

The technology and the data.

So for one, the technology was built originally not for voting.

The technology was built for homeland security.

So whenever you have a technology that was purposely built for one specific thing, you have a vulnerability in that.

Now you're teaching it or expanding it into something completely different, that your technology may be archaic, for example, artificial intelligence, right?

I think everybody uses either cloud or ChatGPT.

If you follow AI and the AI industry, there are some models that anthropic isn't allowing everyone to utilize because of its ability to look at what's called zero days.

Are you familiar with this concept of zero day?

So a zero day is vulnerabilities within the code that coders may have overlooked but that are extant.

So imagine having holes inside of a code and a database that nobody can see until a hacker, whether a black hat hacker, a white hat hacker, is able to come in and steal information or come in and stay.

So you have some of these.

So when I say come in and stay, whenever there's a zero day, that means that there's a hole and opening, somebody can come in and they will stay within your database for years.

Right.

And now the challenge to that is if you have some of these models that have been leaked, and we're using technology that hasn't been secure against some of these models that can find zero days in vulnerabilities.

Now we are opening up our database not just to check voter identification, but to bad actors globally.

- And Chris, you have said that in terms of the resources of the government to track this and to keep the information safe.

It is all there.

- I think that's certainly important.

I think that it's something that we all accept, whether or not we trust the government any more than we trust our bank or our utility company or anyone else that has this information, which they have our social security numbers, our credit cards, our dates of birth.

We hear about hacking all of the time.

I think to not do this, to use this database for the purpose of helping ensure election voter integrity would be foolhardy to suggest that.

Well, it's possible that this could be end up in the hands of untoward actors that could use it against us would be foolish.

There are certainly going to be checks and balances where somebody gets purged accidentally or intentionally through bad actors, that there will be ways for them to cast a vote, a provisional ballot vote, that type of thing, to provide whatever documentation they need to prove that they are, in fact, a citizen, and that no voter who is a legitimate voter will be denied from voting in this country.

- Mitch, as a journalist covering politics for 20 years.

This season of primary will be much more hectic, I think, because of all of these stories.

- Well, it's interesting on this case itself, I understand I looked this up.

DHS, Department of Homeland Security on Friday night did tell the federal judge in Washington that they're not going to challenge her ruling.

So we are talking about four states now, including Florida, and that will play out.

And there might be some litigation we are getting really obviously, that's not going to affect this primary.

I just don't see that going into, you know, there will be a back and forth legally, globally looking at this.

This is President Trump.

This is voting integrity advocates pushing for in Washington what they call the Safe Voting America Act, a version of which we passed in the Florida legislature this past session, which will not go into effect until 2027 or more like the 2028 election.

And this is this big discussion that Chris kind of crystallizes, which is and these are two in terms of like, you know, having allowing one illegal, you know, undocumented person to vote or non-citizen to vote and how that damages the vote versus removing somebody who was legal to vote.

Right.

You know, taking away their right, which we have seen in other cases.

So that will play out.

But in Washington, the big argument, of course, Trump and his acolytes in Florida, Rick Scott and Paulina Luna, have been really advocating for the Save America Act to get passed this year.

We're getting close as you mentioned, we got the primary in five weeks.

We've got the general in November.

This is, you know, should be settled one way or the other when we're getting so close to a major election.

I don't know how that's going to play out.

But again, for us in Florida, by the way, I should say that again, that won't really matter too much in terms of like having to prove our citizenship that will come into play next year, and that will play into the fact that there are people who are, you know, it's going to be a little different than the Washington version, the Tallahassee version.

I won't go into that right now.

- And a new Florida law lets the state officially label organizations, domestic terrorist groups.

Just weeks ago, right here in Tampa, Governor Ron DeSantis announced the first names that he wanted the FDLE to place on that list.

Right now, that designation still has not taken effect, and the whole thing is in front of a federal judge.

Take a look.

The law is House Bill 1471.

It allows the head of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to recommend that a group be designated a terrorist organization.

That is, if the group is based in Florida and the state says it poses a threat.

On July the 1st, the day the law took effect, the governor announced his recommendations for the list.

He named the Council on American-Islamic relations, best known as CAIR; the Muslim Brotherhood, Antifa and more than 90 other groups, including several drug cartels, as terrorist groups.

The very next day, CAIR sued, joined by the Florida chapter of the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Then this week, a twist.

In a court filing Monday, the state's own attorneys told the court they can't yet say when the rules for making the terror group designation legal will be finished.

Both sides are due back in court before the judge on July the 22nd.

This is round two in court.

The governor tried this by executive order back in December.

A federal judge blocked it in March.

The state points to a 2007 terror financing case where CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator, though the group itself was never charged.

CAIR calls that designation political and says the label itself puts its members in danger.

Its Florida director says she reported two violent threats to the Tampa police department in a span of three days.

And, Mitch, you've been covering this story extensively.

Tell us about the latest information on this.

- Right.

So the governor was in Tampa on July 1st, the very first day this law went into effect and basically said, we're making the recommendation.

We got it from Mark Glass, FDLE head.

He's telling he's giving us a recommendation of all these groups, as you mentioned.

And now we have to go to the cabinet.

That's part of the law, is that the cabinet needs to approve or reject that.

And I actually called last week the FDLE and said, where are we at in that process?

Because the governor had said, there is no immediate meeting.

We have to have an emergency meeting.

They still haven't had that meeting.

And I guess what we've learned in the litigation is that I don't know how much official processing needs to take place, but it's just not set up yet.

So in terms of CAIR fighting this designation, they can't even do that right now because the state actually has to go through the correct process.

I think the governor just kind of maybe went a little too quick on this.

He was so eager to do this.

As you mentioned in the piece, this is the second time he's tried to do this executive order.

Back in December, the federal judge in March struck down.

Um, all these groups are mentioned, but we're talking about CAIR, the Council of American-Islamic relations.

And as you mentioned in the piece, this goes back to 2007.

That's really the damning part of where you can, you know, I guess credibly or, you know, the CAIR would disagree with that.

- and that Holy Land Foundation, which, by the way, 245 groups in all were named as unindicted co-conspirators.

It wasn't just CAIR.

I did do a lot of looking into this.

There were some members of CAIR that were known, had some association there.

So it's kind of a, I don't know, a judgment call really to look at that.

But it goes back a long way.

So the fact that this, you know, we have I think the interesting thing is why is this happening now?

Texas did something similar.

I believe Indiana did as well.

I think it really comes after the 2003 Hamas attack on Israel, where we're having and then the protests in college campuses where we're kind of getting the same kind of energy and kind of intensity on this issue that we had after 911 in America.

- But critics are asking, how can a group, several groups, be designated as terrorist organizations?

And there are no specific rules to, uh, to explain what that criteria is.

- Well, I think that's the big question that the state has to answer.

And, um, look, I'm no big fan of any terrorist organization.

Mitch, you might remember back in the day, I wrote a column for the Tampa Tribune actually, to defending CAIR and their actions as an unindicted co-conspirator, which basically just allowed the federal government the opportunity to look into some of their activities.

Subsequently, I have seen their former state head here in Florida.

He did look the other way and refused to say anything bad about what happened in Israel that you referenced on October 7th, rather.

And and to me, that showed me personally made a greater impact of what he didn't say and looking the other way than all the good things that his organization claimed to have done prior to that when he was heading it here in Florida.

It's also probably worth noting that CAIR as a kind of an umbrella group is different from CAIR Florida in terms of what was being done by the federal government in their investigation of CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator.

To my knowledge, that was not the Florida Group based on specifically.

- National headquarters based in Washington, D.C.

they have chapters all over the country.

Um, one of the things that, you know, CAIR has received the most attention.

But the fact is that there were more than 90 organizations that the governor recommended be placed on this list.

They included Antifa, the Muslim Brotherhood, the cartel de Sinaloa, Tren de Aragua, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, cartel of Noreste.

There's quite a few.

Um, what happens to these organizations who are recommended for a terrorist list and are yet never, um, officially placed on.

-It's kind of, you know, it's kind of ill conceived in the sense that it's almost like guilty until proven innocent.

And certainly I'm not a big fan of most of these organizations.

I think if you're sympathetic toward terrorist groups and you're associated with terrorist groups, you probably ought to be treated like a terrorist group.

However, this is still the United States of America.

We have a Constitution, and they have their rights to due process and to be considered innocent until proven guilty.

- And the thing is, is that except for CAIR, these groups, Muslim Brotherhood has no chapters in Florida.

I mean, we've looked.

Okay.

Antifa...that's some people even question whether that's a group versus, uh, you know, protesters who wear black and do demonstrations.

Uh, so, and yes, you know, I talked to a conservative lawmaker, a former lawmaker back when this bill was passed and he had objections to it.

He said, as a as a constitutionalist, he was concerned that, okay, what happens if David Jolly's the governor next year and he decides there's a couple groups that he doesn't like and the, you know, goes away.

Yeah.

You know, right.

Declares that... I mean, it is really, you know, a questionable you know, the law itself is very controversial because again, what's the criteria?

I mean, they do list the criteria there.

But, um, you know, I think that, you know, it's going to be interesting how this all plays out.

- You know, one thing that I wanted to add is that similar to what you were stating is this is a larger organization, right?

And as I researched this, I saw that it is the largest human rights organization designated for Muslims, right?

And so.

- The civil rights organization.

- It's a civil rights organization.

- For the Muslim community in the United States.

- Correct.

And a lot of times these individuals, this is a resource for them.

And so when I saw that, I just think that it is a bit, um, suspect that we're not looking at how do we categorize and unequivocally what an organization, a terror organization is and to pull organizations that's doing civil rights and human rights with a cartel.

And I'm from Central America.

I know what a cartel looks like.

That doesn't look like a cartel.

And this is another thing that I wanted to add.

It's a very slippery slope, right?

Because they've been in a community for so long, they've even received grants from the Florida Bar.

So are you saying that the Florida Bar is complicit with a potential terrorist organization?

Not so.

It's a very slippery slope.

It's it's infringing on the First Amendment.

And especially since you really can't back up and say, this is what a designation looks like it almost kind of seems suspect, and it almost seems as though they're being attacked and kind of even being segregated in a way, because they shouldn't be pulled with someone like a cartel.

- Well, it's something that we will certainly follow when they come back to court and explain things.

We're going to move on to our next story.

For 20 years, the story of the state of Florida has been a really simple one.

People come here, but new census numbers suggest that that story is changing and not in the way you might expect.

Florida added just over 200,000 residents last year.

That's down from nearly 600,000 at the peak, about 551 people a day.

That's down from 1600 a day with births and deaths nearly even.

Migration is essentially the only growth Florida has to count.

Hillsborough and Pinellas both showed negative population growth inland.

Pasco posted the state's second highest gains and Polk, the nation's top-five gains.

Researchers say that one reason stands above the rest for all this inland county growth, and that's that housing prices are significantly more affordable.

I'd like to start with you.

So many folks talk about there is no personal income tax here in the state of Florida.

That's always been a big reason.

The sunshine as well.

What's changing internally?

- Well, there's a couple of things that are changing.

We are very, very resource rich in Florida.

Uh, Tampa, Orlando, Miami.

If you put them economically together, they're one of the top ten mega regions in the world competing with the likes of like a Singapore, which is strange because we don't even have the infrastructure to support it.

So we have this organic, uh, approach to growth.

But here's the challenge.

One of the reasons people were coming into these major cities is because we started to diversify our economy.

Right?

At one point, Orlando and Tampa invested heavily in tech in attracting new technology companies.

- The business and the business sector correct.

- In the business sector.

Housing has not kept up.

Right.

And I'll get to the housing part.

But first let me get to the capital and money part, because first you need money to buy a house.

So when that happened is you allowed for new entrants into the economy.

Let's take tech for instance.

I started my firm right around the tech boom of Tampa, Orlando, Miami.

And my first clients were tech companies, startups, right.

Tech policy, because I saw that there was an avenue for me to service these individuals.

And when I talked to other entrepreneurs, there's a downstream effect of professional services, legal attorneys, lobbyists write, housing comes construction costs.

But now we're getting constraint because we have stopped attracting a lot of these newer companies.

And so when you stop doing that, then the capital isn't flowing as much.

And it becomes very difficult to live in Tampa and in St.

Pete.

And so you're starting to see people going to areas like Polk County, right, where it's a bit more affordable, but then something happens.

You move out to Polk County, you're away from like the central areas of the economy.

And you start telling yourself, I can live anywhere, right?

If I can work from home, I can live anywhere.

And, and so you're starting to see these tensions kind of play out.

And like I was joking in the green room, I went to go buy pancakes.

And before I knew it, my receipt was $200.

Right.

- I think they're all moving to Polk County because the sheriff, Grady Judd.

But no, seriously, I take a little bit more of an elementary, simplistic view of growth.

I'm a native Floridian.

I hate the size of our state and the because it's been so mismanaged, because we elect elected officials that don't give us what we need, they give us what we want.

And here we are talking about stadium improvements to the Bucs Stadium, where the Lightning play, building a stadium for the Rays, and yet we have a 40 year backlog in the city of Tampa alone of street repaving.

And our elected officials are really not to blame because they're giving us what we tell them that we want, not what we need.

There's no leadership.

Nobody saying, hey, I know you want a new stadium, but let's fix the potholes first.

Let's give our teachers a raise, those kinds of things.

- And journalists have been covering stories of the affordable housing crisis.

- And I would just say that Pinellas is number two drop in population in the entire country, according to the U.S.

census, to Los Angeles, Miami number three, by the way.

So it's not the Tampa Bay area.

We're losing population here.

- Yeah, yeah.

And so this is the time of the of the show.

And we like to do the other big stories of the week when we take advantage of the expertise of our panel to talk about stories that they think our viewers should know about.

And so we'd like to start with you, Chris.

What's your big story?

- Well, I kind of already alluded to it.

It's the rays, the rays stadium.

I am a huge opponent of public financing and subsidization of sports stadiums for billionaires.

We need elected officials to make decisions that improve our quality of life, to pave our roads, to fix our stormwaters, to give teachers a raise.

All of these things we're facing now, this property tax reform legislation, or rather, constitutional amendment that is going to completely change the dynamics of how we fund local government.

And to suggest that we're going to go and spend $1 billion of taxpayer money here in Hillsborough County, the city of Tampa, for the purpose of building a ballpark.

It's kind of akin to if you knew you were going to get fired on Friday and going out and buying a Lamborghini, well, you just you just shouldn't do it.

- And there's plenty of important meetings that are going to be happening in the next few days.

Mitch, what is your big story?

- The death penalty.

We had another execution on Tuesday.

That was the 10th this year.

The 29th in the last 19 months.

Ron DeSantis is on a prolific rate of executing death row inmates that we've never seen, not only in Florida but in the country, really.

The pace has been like that, and we've got two more coming on July 28th on the same day, actually two more.

Okay.

- Cesar.

- Yeah.

I'm looking at the region and how it's put in this potential stops on data centers.

Right.

I think that is something that we really need to highlight is just the, the amount of impact that it does on our electric grid, on our resources, on our water.

It's actually refreshing to see that our policymakers across both aisles are looking on these potential moratoriums as they actually study the production of data centers as opposed to just green-lighting them.

- Different counties, different cities are taking action.

Um, we just read that New York's governor is thinking of a moratorium statewide.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for coming in.

Thank you for your time.

We appreciate having you very much.

That's all the time that we have for now.

Thanks to our panelists again.

Cesar Hernandez, Christopher Ingram, and Mitch Perry.

We know you have plenty of choices for your news and information, and we thank you for choosing us.

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