Miami-Dade’s Elections Department declined to use the AmericanAirlines Arena for an early-voting site in November, leaving Miami out of an NBA campaign to convert its venues into polling places in 2020.
An Elections administrator said the main drawback was the one-off nature of the Miami Heat’s offer to turn over the waterfront venue for two weeks of early voting that begin Oct. 19. If not for the COVID emergency that led the NBA to play games in Orlando, the fall election would overlap with the start of the 2021 NBA season in Miami.
Miami-Dade doesn’t like to use early voting sites that can’t be repeated in later years, and chose the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science for downtown’s main polling place for the fall, said Suzy Trutie, the county’s deputy elections supervisor.
Read more at our news partner the Miami Herald.