Governor Ron DeSantis and his legislative posse have added another non-issue to their list of top lawmaking priorities for 2021.
This time, it’s aimed at more security for elections, even though they’ve been bragging for months that Florida’s elections were the most secure and successful anywhere.
“Florida is a model for the rest of the nation to follow,” DeSantis tweeted right after Election Day in November, a line he and others repeated over and over.
Florida was so successful, DeSantis said, “Perhaps 2020 was the year we finally vanquished the ghost of Bush versus Gore.”
Through lessons learned and hard work from previous years, Florida’s 2020 election season was a resounding success and model for the nation. pic.twitter.com/dzIzCM6VM4
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) January 2, 2021
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Republicans throughout the state joined in the chorus of Florida’s resounding success.
“All Florida voters, no matter how they chose to cast a ballot, or who they voted for, could be confident in the integrity of our elections system and the security of their vote,” Secretary of State Laurel Lee said in December when Florida certified its electoral votes for Trump.
So what’s the problem?
It’s obvious: From the Republican point of view, too many Democrats voted by mail in Florida’s 2020 election.
In 2016, about 50,000 more Republicans voted by mail than Democrats, and everything was fine.
In 2020, Democrats were way ahead of Republicans in voting by mail — 2.2 million ballots versus 1.5 million — though the GOP made up for it in early and Election Day turnout, delivering a decisive win for Trump.
Suddenly in 2020, Florida desperately needed to fix voting by mail.
Lake County’s Dennis Baxley, who’s always up for supporting bad legislation, introduced a bill that makes it harder to get a mail ballot by making voters request them more frequently. It already passed one committee on a party-line vote, naturally.
That could just be the warm-up act.
At what looked a lot like a campaign rally last week in West Palm Beach, DeSantis went after “ballot harvesting” and drop boxes where voters can deposit their completed ballots. One proposal would make it illegal for anyone except immediate family to possess someone’s ballot. In other words, if a homebound senior wants help dropping off a ballot, and doesn’t have a son or daughter around, tough luck.
Ballot harvesting and drop boxes are buzzwords and canards used by Republicans to make the public more suspicious of vote results. That allows them to justify changes that are directed at Democrats and — let’s be honest here — Black voters who made the difference in the 2020 presidential election and the Georgia Senate races.
This is how Jim Crow gets done in the 21st century, under the election security guise that DeSantis was selling to the crowd last week.
“We need to make sure our citizens have confidence in the elections,” DeSantis said, failing to explain that the only reason most people lack confidence is because politicians like DeSantis keep promoting the fiction that Trump got cheated.
Last week’s pep rally was designed to stoke more doubt in the outcome, though DeSantis and his legislative supporters can’t name a single election problem to illustrate the problem they’re allegedly trying to solve.
DeSantis could have held a rally to outline initiatives meant to help the working class, which suffered the most, starting with rebuilding the unemployment compensation system that crashed and burned and making benefits less stingy.
What should be issue No. 1 isn’t even on the legislative radar screen. Democrats have filed bills to repair the system but Republicans who control all branches of state government have responded with a collective yawn.
Instead, the governor and legislative leaders are talking up non-issues that promote fear and division, a key element of any culture war.
Non-issues like cracking down on violent civil rights protests, though Florida didn’t have any widespread violence last summer.
Or imposing regulations on social media companies because they finally de-platformed Donald Trump for violating the terms of use he agreed to follow.
None of the problems exposed by the pandemic — housing, low wages, health disparities — are getting attention from Republican leaders.
No, here in Florida the people in power are laser-focused on owning the libs, keeping the base excited and winning the next election.
Solving real problems isn’t part of the 2021 agenda.
Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and are written by one of its members or a designee. The editorial board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Send emails to insight@orlandosentinel.com.
