Earlier this month, Gov. Ron DeSantis held one of his patented one-way press conferences, where he channels Donald Trump’s blunt bullying style and declares he’s doing great things. It was during this press conference that he announced that his Gestapo-style election’s enforcement apparatus was already hard at work excising bad actors from the voter rolls. In fact, DeSantis claimed 20 people had already been charged and were soon to be arrested—people convicted of murder and sexual assault, he claimed—for voter fraud during the 2020 election.
DeSantis vowed these terrible folks would “pay the price.” At the time, most folks with any sense of how much of a lying liar Ron DeSantis is knew that his fascist enforcement apparatus was likely to arrest those people, but that the rest sounded too unlikely to be true.
And according to court documents, DeSantis’ assertions clearly weren’t quite true.
The Guardian reports that many of the (ultimately 19, not 20) people who were targeted by the governor’s brown shirt brigade had been told or led to believe—by elections officials or other state-sanctioned officials—that they were indeed qualified to vote. In many of the cases, they issued a voter registration card and had no issues at all voting, so they were entirely gobsmacked to find out they had broken any law.
Court documents show that many of the defendants caught in this pretend sting claim to have very real reasons for believing they were not breaking the law when they voted in 2020.
One of the voters charged, Douglas Oliver, a 59-year-old Black man in Tampa, was convicted of a sex crime in 2001, which made him ineligible to vote in Florida. He told the Guardian that he had not thought about voting until a canvasser approached him one day at a store and encouraged him to register in 2020. Oliver said he disclosed his felony conviction, and the canvasser said he was eligible. After submitting a registration application, he got a registration card from his local election office in Hillsborough county.
As Daily Kos has noted, Gov. DeSantis announced his intention to create this task force for a few reasons—none of them good. Like all GOP overtures to election integrity, the goal is to scare people away from voting with the threat of incarceration, in a state that has a history of incarcerating all kinds of people of color for just about any reason. DeSantis and the GOP also make these shows of force to distract from their lack of workable policy ideas. The problem is that once you start spending money on people who are tasked with knocking down doors, you will find any excuse to knock down doors.
Here’s another story from the court documents:
Michelle Stribling, a 52-year-old Black woman from Eatonville convicted in 1993 of second degree murder, told investigators during an Aug. 5 interview at her house that she “could not read or write very well,” and did not understand questions related to her status as an ex-felon on registration paperwork. But Orange County election officials mailed her a voter card after she registered, which led her to believe she was able to vote.
DeSantis, of course, didn’t hold a press conference when discussing actual bad actors in Republican strongholds who admitted to doing things like “voting twice.” DeSantis also forgot to mention that many of the people they arrested were not informed they were ineligible to vote until this year—nearly two years after they allegedly voted illegally.
Neil Volz, deputy director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, told The Miami Herald that this mess is a design of bad government decisions, after decades of conservatives cutting resources from election infrastructure. “We’ve been banging this drum for years. If you can’t trust the government to tell you whether you’re eligible in the front end, how can you prosecute somebody in the back end?”
There are two major variations in DeSantis’ approach to election fraud: Voters who have meaningful excuses are mostly people of color and from Democratic areas, while the people DeSantis keeps mum about are white and from Republican-voting areas.
It’s not hard to understand the dueling approaches, of course. It’s anti-Democracy, it’s racist, and it’s the Grand Old Party platform.
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