Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, wants to make voting by mail more difficult after a record number of state residents used the voting method during last year’s election.
In a speech on Friday, DeSantis said Florida had “the most transparent and efficient election anywhere in the country” last year, while advocating for more restrictions, he said they were necessary to “stay ahead of the curve” and improve confidence in the system.
Former President Donald Trump spent months denigrating the electoral system and lying about who won the 2020 race. He particularly attacked postal voting as fraudulent.
Many states have expanded their postal voting systems amid a pandemic that has made voting at the polls a health risk. And while Trump’s lies have been widely refuted, state Republicans across the country are introducing and promoting new voting restrictions, which were often targeted questions raised by the president.
DeSantis proposed a flurry of new electoral laws on Friday, asking the state to limit the use of ballot boxes (the governor said ballots must be mailed or delivered to polling stations), in addition to requiring voters to request ballots more often than they already do, which occurs approximately every two years. He also called for a ban on the collection of votes.
“We did it right in 2020, obviously we have to look and make sure that we are doing better,” he said. Trump defeated Joe Biden in Florida by almost 400,000 more votes, while the state saw more than 9 million votes sent and personally bounced – a 41 percent increase in the 2016 election.
He called for real-time reporting of voter turnout data, as well as coding that unsolicited ballots are not sent to voters in Florida – something he acknowledged that the state no longer does.
DeSantis said he will ask lawmakers to accept his proposals this year. Republican lawmakers in Florida have already introduced a bill requiring voters to request ballots by mail each year.
“They seem to be dealing with a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Eliza Sweren-Becker, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “We don’t have an electoral fraud problem, it is phenomenally scarce.”
The Brennan Center recently reported that there are more than 165 restrictive voting bills in progress in 33 states.
“The proposals that Governor DeSantis offered are consistent with a trend that we see across the country, with state legislators trying to make it more difficult for voters to vote, especially in the context of postal voting,” she said.
There are about 2,000 bills related to the elections under way in state legislatures this year, and voting by mail is in the heart of the man.
The voting method proved to be the key to Biden’s victory, as more Democrats than Republicans adopted the method instead of meeting at the polls while an uncontrolled pandemic raged. Experts attributed this division to Trump’s relentless effort to sow doubts about the integrity of the 2020 race with false claims that postal voting is inherently fraudulent.
Since then, Republicans have focused on the voting system for reversals, in some cases targeting laws that the Republican Party had defended years before the pandemic.
Republican National Committee Chair, Ronna McDaniel told Fox News recently that reversing pandemic changes in elections, such as expanded postal voting, was “an absolutely important effort” for the party.
