Ron DeSantis announced criminal charges over
alleged illegal voting in 2020, the first major public move from the
Republican’s new election police unit. Photograph: Amy Beth Bennett/AP
“This
is all performance art by the governor,” said Daniel Smith, a political
science professor at the University of Florida who has studied felon
voting rights in Florida. “He’s decided to continue to prey on the most
vulnerable individuals in Florida. It’s par for the course.”
This is a very ambitious limited man who should be reined in for the good of humanity. Beyond ELECTION INTEGRITY, there is another INTEGRITY in question - and MIA.
This is an obscene thing to do to people who are powerless to avoid being run over by a power tripping merchant.
Is this man fit to be governor of a State?
On one of those Florida beaches, DeSantis would be the sand kicking brute. Just open the image in a new browser tab. Have you seen a meaner expression on a politician's face than this man cannot keep from showing? The bunch in the photo, each of them, they don't look friendly. No they don't.
__________UPDATE__________
WaPo has coverage. Their drift seems to be not viewing the DeSantis stunt as in any manner being a worthwhile or substantial exercise of Florida executive machinery -
When
they went to the polls in November 2018, Florida voters made two
choices. They narrowly selected Rep. Ron DeSantis (R) to serve as their
governor. They also overwhelmingly decided to grant felons the right to vote by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.
[...] DeSantis called for legislation that would constrain implementation of the seemingly straightforward policy. In June 2019, the new governor signed a bill that mandated that felons be enfranchised only after they had repaid any outstanding fines or fees they owed.
This
is trickier than it sounds, both because of the direct cost of making
the payments and because of the way in which those fees might have been
assessed. It was often hard for those subject to the law to determine
what they owed.
“Florida has no centralized database to allow people to figure out what
legal financial obligations they owe to the state,” ProPublica explained last month. “Instead, its 67 counties and various state agencies each maintain their own databases.”
The
law was challenged in court, with opponents arguing that it amounted to
a modern poll tax. In September 2020, shortly before the first election
in which those individuals would have been able to vote, a federal
appeals court ruled that the pay-your-fees stipulation could stand.
The problem was that a number of people covered by Amendment 4 had already registered. That ProPublica article details
the case of Kelvin Bolton, who had registered while in jail. A county
elections official came and told prisoners they could register, so he
did. He doesn’t remember being told that he needed to pay off any fines
so, when he voted in the November election, he was unwittingly
committing another crime.
ProPublica
found 10 examples of people similarly affected: told they could
register to vote and then doing so — and ending up with criminal
charges.
Those
10 cases probably don’t overlap with the 20 announced by DeSantis in a
campaign-style event on Thursday. [...]
Each was a felon.
[...] Just as DeSantis was aware of the political utility of announcing the
creation of the “Office of Election Crimes and Security” earlier this
year, in the midst of ongoing agitation on the right over the specter of
rampant voter fraud, he is aware of the utility of standing at a
lectern and announcing that purported criminals had been found.
And
that this isn’t “voter fraud," as such. An operating theory of
Republican politics in the Donald Trump era has been that there’s a
rampant effort to cast votes illegally on behalf of unwitting actors.
This is people casting votes on their own behalf who are simply having
their votes thrown out. [...] There have been multiple examples in recent years of states making
splashy announcements about fraud only to have those allegations wither. Skepticism is warranted here particularly given DeSantis’s track record of hyping culture-war victories that turn out to be little more than the hype itself.
There has been actual voter fraud alleged in Florida. Four people
who live in the conservative, senior-oriented community of the Villages
have been arrested for committing fraud. DeSantis did not hold a press
conference to celebrate that triumph of law enforcement.
That
clarifies another particularly revealing aspect of the governor’s
announcement. The subtext to much of the fretting over purported illegal
voting is that it’s the wrong people who are casting ballots, which is clearly what DeSantis wants to highlight. [...] The
backlash against Amendment 4 had some obvious grounding in worries that
those new voters would vote for Democrats — in part because they were disproportionately Black.
This week brought related news on that front. The Justice Department argued in a court filing that a law DeSantis signed last year restricting
voting access included “provisions that impose disparate burdens on
Black voters” — provisions “chosen precisely because of those burdens to
secure a partisan advantage.” The filing was offered as an appellate
court evaluates whether a lower-court ruling that the law is discriminatory should stand.
Readers can scan the return list to get a feeling for the mood and judgment the media holds toward this nasty-mean DeSantis self-promotional huckstering.
