Who is doing this and why
About
Make Florida Blue is written from an openly progressive point of view, and says so on every page. The record layer and the opinion layer are separated on purpose, and never blended.
Who is behind this
A concerned citizen.
That is not evasion for its own sake. Writing critically about people in power, under a name, in this particular moment, carries risks that are not hypothetical to everyone who might do it. Anonymous political writing has a long history in this country and a settled place in its law, going back well before the Constitution was ratified and affirmed by the Supreme Court since.
There may come a point where putting a name to this does more good than staying quiet does. If that day comes, we will say so here.
Until then, judge the work.
That is not a dodge either. Everything on this site is sourced and linked. You do not need to know who wrote it to check whether it is true. That is the entire reason we built it this way. A named author asks you to trust them. We are asking you to verify us instead, which is a better deal for you.
You can be an author
This site does not belong to one person, and it is not supposed to.
If you live in Florida and you know something, send it. A vote your commissioner took. A budget line nobody noticed. A document you obtained through a public records request. A pattern you have watched develop in your county that nobody has written down.
Here is what happens to it:
We verify it. Same two-stage process as everything else. A source gets identified, then a human opens the link and confirms it. If you send us a document, we check it against the issuing agency.
If it holds up, it publishes. With attribution if you want it, anonymously if you do not. Your call, and we will ask before we publish either way.
If it does not hold up, we tell you why. Not "no thanks." Specifically what we could not confirm and what would confirm it. Sometimes the answer is that the thing is true and we just cannot document it yet, in which case it goes on our pending list rather than in the trash.
What we cannot use: anything we cannot trace to a record. Rumors, secondhand accounts, and "everybody knows" do not clear the bar no matter how confident the person telling us is. We have rejected claims we believed. We will reject yours too if it does not verify, and we will not be rude about it.
We are more interested in a boring document you found in a county agenda packet than in the most dramatic story nobody can prove.
Submissions are open, with two honest caveats
You can send it now. No name or email is required, and the form works with both left blank.
The first caveat is that a web form is not anonymity. Our code does not record your IP address, but our host keeps access logs containing visitor IP addresses for up to 30 days and we cannot turn that off.
The second is that we decline high-risk material outright. If disclosing what you have could cost you your job or your safety, we are not equipped to protect you, and we say so and point you elsewhere rather than taking it anyway. The submission page explains both before you type anything.