When a guy in a red hat arrives to knock on the doors of senior citizens in Miami-Dade County, Florida, living in a low-income building, suspicions are rightly raised. Fast forward to months later, when an 84-year-old grandmother’s voter registration card arrived in the mail to show that her lifelong affiliation to the Democratic party had been changed to Republican.
Juan Carlos Salazar, 77, a Dominican living in Little Havana, and registered Democratic voter since the ‘70s, tells the Orlando Sentinel, that in December he was confronted by a group of three canvassers wearing red hats and t-shirts that read “Republican Party of Florida.” They asked if he wanted to fill out an application to get a new voter ID. He says, he “didn’t do anything,” but that he realized his party had been changed to Republican when he received his new registration in the mail.
“This is a system to eliminate voters so that voters can’t participate in the primary,” Salazar said in an interview with the Miami Herald in front of Haley Sofge Towers, the public housing building he’s lived in for the past five years. “It concerns me about what’s going to happen in these next elections ... This is a scam.”
Now, Democratic State Attorney for Miami-Dade County, Katherine Fernandez Rundle, is promising to investigate allegations of voter fraud, announcing a new initiative that includes a voter protection hotline and task force.