In the 2020 presidential election, more Floridaers than ever voted by mail. Now the government of Florida, Ron DeSantis, wants to complicate the vote by mail.
At a Palm Beach news conference on Friday, DeSantis, a Republican, announced a proposed list of new voting restrictions that would make it harder for voters to receive and return votes in the upcoming Florida election.
In doing so, he joined a flurry of state and local officials who have been working during the months since the 2020 general election to impose new voting restrictions, arguing that these policies will make the vote safer.
Specifically, DeSantis called on the Florida legislature to address “the harvest of the vote” (when the ballots are taken for delivery at a polling station) and the ballot boxes to send the ballots to voters who do not one request, and to tighten the rules regarding the request for a vote so that requests must be every election year.
According to the Florida ACLU, a ballot request is currently valid for two general election cycles. The proposed change to DeSantis would mean that voters would have to do so more frequently, which could potentially increase the logistical barriers to postal voting.
In his speech, DeSantis also praised Florida’s suffrage system, arguing that the state had the “most transparent and efficient election in the country,” pointing out that Florida – which went to former President Donald Trump in November – counted much faster. has as some states. But he claims the new measures are necessary to ensure the integrity of the election.
“We need to make sure we continue to stay ahead,” DeSantis said Friday. “We need to make sure our citizens have confidence in the election.”
However, it is unclear whether his proposed changes, if adopted into law, will contribute much to that.
Many of the policies DeSantis has proposed are essentially already in its state: Florida currently does not allow the mass mailing of unsolicited ballots, and the state also has significant restrictions on the “harvest of the vote” that already exists, something that DeSantis acknowledged in his speech.
“We are not a big crop state as it is,” he said. “But any type of loophole, or any kind of room where it can be abused, we want to make sure we address it.”
Trump has previously attacked the harvest of ballot papers as ‘proliferating with fraud’, which it is not, and the practice is a regular Republican hobby. According to NPR, however, Trump himself had his ballot in Florida submitted by a third party in 2020.
DeSantis also suggested Friday that Florida may need to find ways to tighten up its existing game-signing legislation, which requires the signature on an absentee or by ballot to match the voter signature already on file.
“If there are to be ways to strengthen the signature verification,” DeSantis said, “then so should we.”
Signature verification laws can be problematic, however: signature reconciliations can be very subjective, as Atlantic Grain David Graham reported last year, and among other demographers, color voters are often rejected at a much higher rate than white voters.
“Fraud is extremely rare,” Graham points out. “The much greater danger is that legitimate ballots will be thrown out.”
Overall, the 2020 Florida election – like the elections held by all other states – went without unusual irregularities or major fraud; it is unclear how DeSantis’s proposals would improve the current system.
However, it is clear that they are squarely joining a national trend in the aftermath of the 2020 election cycle: After losing control of not only the presidency but also the Senate, Republicans are moving across the country to make the vote more difficult .
The Republican solution to losing an election is to make it harder to vote
In the months since the presidential election, Republican lawmakers in Trump’s unfounded rhetoric have leaned on election fraud and moved quickly to introduce new voting restrictions.
Specifically, according to a February report from the Brennan Center for Justice, thirty-three states have introduced, submitted or passed 165 restrictive bills this year (compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020). “
Some of the bills, such as a measure in Georgia that would end early voting on Sundays, were shamelessly aimed at black voters, who played a key role in Democrats demanding Senate control. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explained Friday, the change would be a blow to black churches hosting ‘Souls to the Polls’ convention events, in which congregation members are transported to church premises by church leaders. to services.
Others, such as a Republican-backed bill in Arizona that requires all ballot papers to be notarized, will make it harder for anyone to cast an absent vote.
Many of the states where Republicans are pushing for new voter restrictions, including Arizona and Georgia, will be competitive Senate contests in 2022.
Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly will seek a full term of six years in 2022 after winning a special election in 2020, as well as Senator Raphael Warnock, Georgia, who won his seat in a special election result in January this year.
And Republicans will defend seats in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa – all three states to which Republicans have moved to impose new voter restrictions – as well as Florida, where Senator Marco Rubio will be re-elected.
Despite the spate of new bills, however, it is not certain that Republicans will succeed in passing new voter restrictions into law. In some states, such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Democratic governors could veto such changes.
And even in Georgia, where Republicans control the governor as well as the legislature, one anonymous Republican strategist told the Washington Post that such measures could catch fire. “There is still an appetite of many Republicans to do such things, but it is not clear,” he said. “It just gives Democrats a baseball bat we can beat.”
At the national level, Democrats also have their own plan to expand suffrage and protect voters: the John Lewis suffrage law, named after the late civil rights activist who represented a district of Georgia in the House until his death last year. has.
According to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the bill will restore the most important parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – parts of which were deleted by the Supreme Court in 2013 – to protect the voting rights of all Americans. . ”
There is also the For For People Act, which was reintroduced on the first day of the new Congress in 2021. If passed, the bill would be expanded earlier and the vote emailed, it would be easier to register to vote and put an end to bias. gerrymandering, among other changes.
“You know our work is far from finished,” Lewis said. said in 2019. “It makes me sad. It makes me cry when people are deprived of the right to vote. We all know that this is not a Democratic or Republican issue; this is an American case. ‘