Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is continuing his arbitrary-ass war on accessible voting because, well…I honestly have no idea. Well, actually I do: The Republican game plan to disenfranchise non-Republican voters is pretty well-documented—but for DeSantis, voter suppression is like his version of porn addiction. But blocking felons from retaining their voting rights after they have served their time doesn’t appear to be enough for the Larry Flynt of Brian Kemps to get his rocks off anymore, so now he’s typing “down with mail-in voting” into the Republican Pornhub tab. (I should probably end this analogy here before I get really gross.)
NBC News reports that DeSantis gave a speech Friday in which he bragged that Florida had “the most transparent and efficient election anywhere in the country” last year. Despite this claim—which he presented without pointing to anything that backs it up because that’s the Republican way—DeSantis still believes more restrictions on voting are necessary.
From NBC:
DeSantis proposed a spate of new election laws on Friday, calling for the state to limit the use of ballot drop boxes (the governor said ballots should be mailed or dropped off at election offices), as well as requiring voters to request mail ballots more frequently than they already do, which is roughly every two years. He also called for prohibiting ballot collection.
“We did it right in 2020, we obviously gotta look and make sure we’re doing it better,” he said. Trump beat Joe Biden in Florida by nearly 400,000 more votes while the state saw more than 9 million mail-in and in-person ballots returned — up 41 percent from the 2016 election.
He called for real-time reporting of voter turnout data, as well as codifying that unsolicited ballots won’t be mailed to voters in Florida — something he acknowledged the state already doesn’t do.
DeSantis said he would ask lawmakers to take up his proposals this year. Already, Republican lawmakers in Florida have introduced a bill requiring voters to request mail ballots each year.
Imagine being this committed to coming up with solutions for problems that don’t exist.
For now, I’ll suspend my suspicion that DeSantis thinks Trump’s win in Florida, in and of itself, is proof that the state’s election officials “did it right in 2020″—because it’s the “we obviously gotta look and make sure we’re doing it better” part that really gets me. How is it obvious that Florida needs to improve after already achieving a perfect score (which it gave itself via DeSantis’ unearned hubris)?
G/O Media may get a commission
“They seem to be addressing a problem that isn’t there,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, told NBC. “We don’t have a voter fraud problem, it’s phenomenally scarce.
“The proposals that Gov. DeSantis has offered are consistent with a trend that we’re seeing across the country with state lawmakers trying to make it harder for voters to cast their ballots, particularly in the context of mail voting,” she continued.
Sweren-Becker is right, of course. Report after report after report—including one from the Brennan Center—shows that significant voter fraud in America is as mythical as DeSantis’ competence and integrity.
Hell, even Donald Trump—the Ron Jeremy of voter fraud propaganda (yeah, I’m doing the porn thing again)—commissioned a voter fraud task force in 2018, but then dismantled it after it came up with nada to substantiate the corrupt election claims Trump had already run wild with.
And that’s what this is really about. It’s about keeping as few people voting as possible because that’s how Republicans win, but it’s also about using Trump’s old wrinkly tangerine ballsack as a sex swing because voter fraud propaganda porn just isn’t hardcore enough otherwise. (I told you it would get super gross.)
My point is, despite Trump being ousted from the presidency…and Twitter…and probably Melania’s speed-dial, his legacy of delusion and moral corruption continues through his most loyal supporters who are still in office.
And that damn sure includes DeSantis’ horny ass.
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