In the 2020 presidential election, more Floridians than ever voted by mail. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis now wants to make voting by mail difficult.
At a press conference in Palm Beach on Friday, DeSantis, a Republican, announced a proposal for new voting restrictions that would make it more difficult for voters to receive and return ballots by mail in future Florida elections.
In doing so, he joined a wave of state and local officials who have worked in the months since the 2020 general election to introduce new voting restrictions, arguing that these policies will make voting safer.
Specifically, DeSantis asked the Florida legislature to address “polling” (when ballots in the mail are collected for delivery to a delivery location) and ballot boxes, to prohibit sending ballots to voters who did not request them, and to tighten the rules on how to request a vote so that requests are made each election year.
Currently, a postal ballot request is valid for two rounds of general elections, according to Florida ACLU; The change proposed by DeSantis would mean that voters would have to do this more often, potentially increasing logistical barriers to voting by mail.
DeSantis also praised Florida’s voting system in his speech, arguing that the state had the “most transparent and efficient election anywhere in the country” and noting that Florida – which was won by former President Donald Trump in November – said ballots much faster than some states. But he said the new measures are necessary to ensure electoral integrity.
“We need to make sure that we remain ahead of the curve,” said DeSantis on Friday. “We need to ensure that our citizens have confidence in the elections.”
It is not clear, however, whether the proposed changes, if passed by law, would go a long way toward helping these goals.
Many of the policies proposed by DeSantis are already essentially in effect in your state: Florida currently does not allow the mass sending of unsolicited ballots by mail, and the state also has substantial restrictions on “vote collection” already in place, something that DeSantis admitted in his speech.
“We are not as big of a vote collecting state as it is,” he said. “But any kind of breach, or any type of room where it can be abused, we want to make sure that we are going to resolve this.”
Trump had previously attacked vote-gathering as “rampant with fraud”, which it is not, and the practice is a frequent Republican hobby horse. According to NPR, however, Trump himself had his ballot paper mailed in Florida sent by a third party in 2020.
DeSantis also suggested on Friday that Florida may need to find ways to tighten its existing signature matching law, which requires signing on an absent ballot or voting by mail to match the voter’s signature already filed.
“If there is a need to enforce signature verification,” said DeSantis, “then we need to do that too.”
Signature verification laws, however, can be problematic: signature incompatibilities can be highly subjective, as David Graham of Atlantic reported last year, and voters of color, among other demographics, often have their ballots rejected at a fee much larger than white voters.
“Fraud is extremely rare,” says Graham. “The far greater danger is that legitimate ballots will be rejected.”
Overall, the 2020 election in Florida – like the elections held by all other states – took place without any unusual irregularities or general fraud; it is not clear how DeSantis’ proposals would improve the current system.
It is clear, however, that they fit perfectly with a national trend after the 2020 election cycle: after losing control not only of the presidency, but of the Senate, Republicans across the country are moving to make voting difficult.
The Republican solution to losing an election is to make it harder to vote
In the months following the presidential election, Republican state legislatures leaned towards Trump’s unfounded rhetoric of electoral fraud and acted swiftly to impose new voting restrictions.
Specifically, according to a February report from the Brennan Center for Justice, “Thirty-three states introduced, pre-filled or passed 165 restrictive bills this year (compared with 35 of those bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020 ). “
Some of these bills, as a measure in Georgia that would end early voting on Sundays, blatantly target black voters, who played an important role in claiming Democratic control of the Senate. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explained on Friday, the move “would be a blow to black churches hosting ‘Souls to the Polls’ events to get votes” on Sunday, in which parishioners are transported by church leaders to polling places after services.
Others, such as a bill supported by Republicans in Arizona that would require all ballots voted by mail to be authenticated, would make it more difficult for anyone to vote absent.
Many of the states where Republicans are promoting new restrictions on voters, including Arizona and Georgia, will be venues for Senate contests in 2022.
Arizona Senator Mark Kelly will seek a full six-year term in 2022 after winning a special election in 2020, as will Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who won his seat in a second round of the special election in January this year. .
And Republicans will defend seats in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa – all three states where Republicans have moved to implement new restrictions on voters – as well as Florida, where Senator Marco Rubio will run for reelection.
Despite the flurry of new bills, however, it is not certain that Republicans will succeed in passing new restrictions on voters in law. In some states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Democratic governors could veto such changes.
And even in Georgia, where Republicans control the governor’s mansion as well as the legislature, an anonymous Republican strategist told the Washington Post that such measures could backfire. “There is still an appetite for many Republicans to do things like that, but it is not brilliant,” he said. “It just gives Democrats a baseball bat to beat us.”
At the national level, Democrats also have their own plan to expand voting rights and protect voters: the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, named after the late civil rights activist who represented a district of Georgia in the House until his death last year.
According to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the bill would restore large parts of the 1965 Right to Vote Act – parts of which were overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013 – in order to “protect the voting rights of all Americans. “
There is also the People’s Law, which was reintroduced on the first day of the new Congress in 2021. If passed, the law would be expanded and voted by mail, would facilitate registration to vote and end gerrymandering supporters, among other changes.
“You know that our work is far from over,” Lewis said in 2019. “It makes me sad. I want to cry when people don’t have the right to vote. We all know that this is not a Democratic or Republican issue: it is an American issue ”.