Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, wants to make it harder to vote by mail after a record number of state residents used the voting method during last year’s election.
In a speech Friday, DeSantis said Florida last year was “the most transparent and effective election in the country.”, while advocating for more restrictions, he said it was necessary to ‘stay ahead’ and improve confidence in the system.
Former President Donald Trump has been downplaying the electoral system for months, lying about who won the 2020 race. He particularly attacked postal voting as fraudulent.
Many states have expanded their mail system amid a pandemic that has made the gathering of polls a health risk. And while Trump’s lies have been widely proven, state republics across the country are nevertheless introducing and imposing new voting restrictions, which have often been target issues raised by the president.
DeSantis on Friday proposed a wave of new election laws calling on the state to restrict the use of ballots (the governor said the ballots should be dropped off by post or at the polling stations), as well as asking voters more frequently to request the ballot papers. than they already do, which is about every two years. He also called for the collection of ballot papers to be banned.
“We did it right in 2020, we obviously need to look and make sure we do it better,” he said. Trump beat Joe Biden in Florida by nearly 400,000 more votes, while the state saw more than 9 million entries and personal ballots return – 41 percent higher than the 2016 election.
He called for timely reporting of voter turnout data, as well as stipulating that unsolicited ballot papers would not be mailed to voters in Florida – something he acknowledges the state is not already doing.
DeSantis has said it will ask lawmakers to address its proposals this year. Republican lawmakers in Florida have already tabled a bill requiring voters to vote by mail annually.
“They seem to be dealing with a problem that is not there,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the New York University School of Law. “We do not have a problem with voter fraud, it is phenomenally rare.”
The Brennan Center recently reported that there are more than 165 restrictive bills in the 33 states.
“The proposals put forward by Governor DeSantis are in line with a trend we are seeing nationwide with lawmakers trying to make civil servants’ votes more difficult, especially in the context of postal voting,” she said.
There have been nearly 2,000 election bills working through state legislatures all these years, and the voice of post is the core of mankind.
The voting method was the key to Biden’s victory, as more Democrats than Republicans adopted the method rather than gather at the ballot box while an uncontrolled pandemic raged. Experts attributed this rift to Trump’s relentless attempt to cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 race with false claims that vote-by-mail is inherently fraudulent.
Since then, Republicans have reset the voting system for refunds, and in some cases focused on laws put forward by the IDP years before the pandemic.
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel Fox News recently said that the return of pandemic election changes such as widespread consent for the party was ‘absolutely an important effort’.
