Florida's governor and store-brand Trump Ron DeSantis finally got his wish, though there was hardly any doubt the state's Republican legislators would grant it. State Republicans gifted DeSantis on Wednesday with his asked-for personal "election fraud"-hunting police force, one controlled by DeSantis' state State Department that will comb the state looking for any election fraud of the sort that Republicans claim is omnipresent, despite never finding any versions of such fraud beyond "a single voter was confused" or "some Republican crank somewhere filled out his dead mother's ballot."
There is no evidence of large-scale election fraud anywhere in the country, and zero chance that such fraud would ever actually work given the safeguards in place, but Republicans are using claims of imaginary "voter fraud" to implement a wide array of new laws intended to make voting more difficult, more time consuming, and more costly so the party remains obsessed with finding something, anything, that can be used to justify those laws. And they're going to make taxpayers pay for it, because that is what Republicans have been doing for many years now: passing unconstitutional or simply pointless new laws while sticking state taxpayers with the bills for the resulting lawsuits or do-nothing office work.
The new DeSantis-controlled state police force will hunt for "fraud" in large part by inventing it. As The Washington Post explains, the new Republican bill makes having more than two ballots on your person a felony—a move clearly intended to erase get-out-the-vote efforts by Black churches and other community groups devoted to helping voters vote.
The Post also notes that the $2.5 million allocated to the DeSantis fraud force, which will be staffed by 25 people, is significantly less than the $6 million, 52-person team DeSantis had envisioned. Given that Florida found just 75 possible cases of "election fraud" during the 2020 elections, even with Trump bellowing that every third iguana and fourth invasive python was committing it, however, we can expect that those 25 people are going to be spending a whole lot of time twiddling their thumbs.
Related: Perdue copies DeSantis, wants new state agency to investigate imaginary election fraud
Related: There was voter fraud in 2020! It was committed by Republicans living in a Florida senior community
Related: Republicans in Wisconsin, Michigan can't stop obsessing over the election fraud they never found
Related: Texas spent another 22,000 hours hunting for 'election fraud' and didn't find a damn thing