DeSantis’ crackdown on voter fraud is all ‘gotcha!’ and no real solutions | Editorial

How did the state of Florida allow 20 felons to get voter-registration cards if they were clearly ineligible to get their rights restored?

That his own administration failed to flag ineligible voters doesn’t seem to faze Gov. Ron DeSantis. He has made a spectacle of the 20 voter-fraud arrests he announced with fanfare during a news conference in August. The arrested told the Miami Herald they applied for and received voter cards from their local supervisor of elections office. In other words, they didn’t know they couldn’t vote, and the officials who were supposed to stop them didn’t.

Moving forward, the DeSantis administration has a solution for that, but doesn’t involve fixing this broken system.

Eight days after the governor’s news conference in August, the Florida Department of Corrections quietly updated the form Floridians on probation are supposed to sign. Now, they must acknowledge that it’s up to them to determine if they are eligible to vote, the Herald has reported. Essentially, the form now shifts the burden to returning citizens, who usually have low literacy levels. This lets the state off the hook.

The new form states people can find “helpful information at the Florida Department of State’s website.” But it doesn’t mention consulting with county elections supervisors about eligibility or that people can seek an advisory opinion on their voting status from the secretary of state, who oversees elections.

There’s nothing wrong with giving information to people about their rights and responsibilities. It might be helpful for ex-felons to read the warning so they don’t find themselves caught in the next voter-fraud investigation by the newly created Office of Election Crimes and Security.

But as Alex Saiz, a lawyer for the Florida Justice Center, told the Herald, these forms could be used as evidence to show future actions by released inmates were “willful.” That’s the key to DeSantis’ efforts. To properly prosecute people for casting illegal ballots, the state must prove they knew they were committing a crime.

It’s the perfect setup:

Florida lets ex-felons still unaware they can’t vote register to vote.

Supervisors of elections let them cast ballots.

DeSantis’ elections police arrest them.

DeSantis takes credit for combating voter fraud.

Felons be warned: You vote at your own peril. If this works in keeping people from voting, it essentially annuls the intent of voters who restored voting rights for some felons in 2018 through a constitutional amendment. It’s voter intimidation disguised as bureaucracy.

It should have been easy for the state to determine those 20 felons shouldn’t be on the voter rolls. As the Herald previously reported, all of them have sex offenses or murder charges on their records. Amendment 4 was explicit in excluding those charged with these serious offenses from getting their voting rights restored.

Yet they were given voter ID cards after initial checks by the Department of State. A state truly interested in rooting out voter fraud would focus on why that happened.

Republican lawmakers spent taxpayer dollars to create the Office of Election Crimes and Security this year. Instead of focusing on big schemes like the ghost candidates funded by big political players to sway elections away from Democrats, the DeSantis’ elections police goes for the low-hanging fruit: former inmates who get little sympathy from the public.

Republicans themselves made it very hard — an “administrative nightmare,” as a federal judge put it — for state experts to determine whether a felon can have his or her voting rights restored. Not happy that Florida voters approved Amendment 4, lawmakers set out to muddy the waters. The ballot language stated that felons would be eligible to vote once “all terms of their sentence including parole or probation” were satisfied. Thanks to additional requirements imposed by lawmakers, the state now has to also check if a felon still owes criminal fines, court fees or restitution to victims.

Although the number of registered voters in Florida grew by 50% since 2005, staff numbers at the Florida Department of State’s Division of Elections has remained roughly the same, the Herald reported. The department director testified in a federal case in 2020 that her office had a backlog of 85,000 registration applications that had been flagged, and her team of 20 could process only 57 a day.

The Republican-controlled Florida Legislature this year allocated $1 million to hire 15 new employees at the department. That’s good, but it’s a drop in the bucket. At DeSantis’ request, lawmakers also set aside more than twice that amount to hire 25 people, including law enforcement officers, for the Office of Election Crimes and Security.

Hiring more civil servants to do the un-glamorous work of checking voter applications doesn’t make for good political rallies. Arresting felons for alleged voter fraud when millions of people believe the 2020 elections were stolen, on the other hand, makes DeSantis — by design, of course —look like a hero.