A county elections supervisor in Florida has removed a mosque from a list of polling locations after receiving a flood of complaints, frustrating local Muslims who say the move is discriminatory because churches and other houses of worship are still scheduled to host voters on Election Day.
According to the Orlando Sun-Sentinel, Palm Beach County elections supervisor Susan Bucher initially listed the Islamic Center of Boca Raton as a polling location for upcoming elections. But last week Bucher called Bassem Alhalabi, the president of the mosque, to inform him that she would be directing voters to a nearby public library instead.
If Muslims are good to vote in a church and a synagogue, then Christian and Jews are also good to vote in an Islamic center.
Bucher, a Democrat currently running for reelection for the non-partisan position, did not offer an official explanation for the sudden shift, and her office did not immediately return requests for comment from ThinkProgress. Alhalabi, however, says she told him over the phone that she had received more than 50 phone calls from locals complaining about using the mosque as polling location.
Alhalabi and other Muslims say the complaints shouldn’t matter, because dozens of churches and other houses of worship are still mentioned on the Palm Beach Country elections website as places that will welcome voters in November.
“This is not democratic,” Alhalabi told the Sun-Sentinel. “If Muslims are good to vote in a church and a synagogue, then Christian and Jews are also good to vote in an Islamic center.”
The Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also spoke out against the change, issuing a formal letter demanding Bucher reinstate the mosque and hinting that they could take legal action if she does not comply.
“The supervisor of elections is evidently targeted by an organized lobbying campaign spreading fear and Islamophobia,” CAIR spokeswoman Laila Abdelaziz said in a statement. “Her discretion to designate or remove polling sites must never be based on religious, racial or ethnic bias. This apparent unconstitutional religious bias may need to be corrected by our courts.”
Indeed, while some take issue with using religious spaces as polling locations, churches, synagogues, and other worship halls have served as voting centers throughout American history. A rabbi serving a Reform Jewish congregation in nearby Boynton Beach noted this history while voicing support for using the mosque as a polling center last week, saying, “to suggest that every mosque is pure evil and every other religious institution is pure good is just not accurate and it’s prejudice and it’s wrong.”
The controversy comes in the midst of rising anti-Islam sentiment in the United States broadly and in Florida specifically. Sunshine State Muslims have endured harassment and beatings in the wake of the tragic shooting in Orlando, where an ISIS-affiliated militant gunned down 49 people at a gay night club. Since the attack, the mosque that shooter attended has been subject to harassment despite repeatedly asking for police protection, and one member of the congregation was beaten outside the mosque by a man who screamed racial slurs as he pummeled the victim.
Since the ISIS-affiliated attack in Paris last year, ThinkProgress has tracked at least 90 of retaliatory threats, assaults, protests, instances of vandalism, and airport profiling directed at American Muslims. Nine occurred in Florida.