'Vote for Freedom' Rally in Fort Lauderdale Tonight: Las Olas Oceanside Park, 6 to 8 P.M., the Night Before We Vote

South Florida's Election Eve has a gathering place. The We the People Coalition will hold its 'Vote for Freedom' rally tonight, Monday, November 2, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Las Olas Oceanside Park, 3000 East Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale — doors at 5:30, live music from 6, and the program from 6:30. The event is free and open to the public, nonpartisan by its organizers' own terms: the release announcing it states plainly that We The People does not endorse candidates. Its theme is a schedule as much as a slogan: 'The night before we vote, we rally.'

The coalition behind it is broad — more than 70 South Florida organizations, per the release — and the speaker list mixes labor, elected office and advocacy: Broward Teachers Union president Anna Fusco, State Representative Ashley Gantt, former Assistant Secretary of Labor Jose Javier Rodriguez, U.S. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Transinclusive Group executive director Tatiana Williams and AHF's Esteban Wood, with live entertainment from the Deep-Fried Funk Band. The issues the rally names are the ones its organizers say elected leadership decides: access to affordable healthcare, education, economic opportunity, civil rights, LGBTQ+ equality and social justice.

The practical frame is Tuesday. Florida's polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 7 p.m., at assigned precincts, and an Election Eve rally in Broward — the state's second-most-populous county and, with Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, part of the tri-county turnout map both parties have worked all weekend — is aimed at the voters who have not yet voted: everyone who skipped early voting has exactly one window left. Tonight's program ends at 8. The first polls open eleven hours later.