Ron DeSantis asks Florida lawmakers for $6m for election police agency

A proposal from Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis to create a new police agency to investigate the state’s elections has worried voting rights advocates, elections officials and members of Congress as GOP legislators across the US overhaul election administration.

The governor is asking state legislators to approve nearly $6m to fund an Office of Election Crime and Security, which would employ 52 investigators to “facilitate the faithful enforcement of election laws and will provide Floridians with the confidence that their vote will count,” he said in an address this month. He first proposed the office in November.

The office – with a staff that is “larger than most police departments have to solve murders,” according to Tampa Bay Times – would act on tips from government officials or citizens and be tasked with investigating and arresting people accused of voter fraud.

Republican legislators across the US have filed dozens of bills to restrict ballot access and consolidate electoral oversight into the hands of their GOP-controlled legislatures, under a banner of “election integrity” and restoring “voter confidence” in the wake of the 2020 presidential election and a baseless voter fraud narrative promoted by Donald Trump and his allies.

Last year, Mr DeSantis signed a law to cut down on early voting and mail-in ballots and ban groups or individuals from mailing out sealed absentee ballots on other voters’ behalf, a practice conservatives label “ballot harvesting” and that the governor has called a “serious attack on democracy.” He also wants to make it a third-degree felony.

His latest proposal is “a solution in search of a problem,” Orange County Elections Supervisor Bill Cowles told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

An editorial in Tampa Bay Times called it a “make-up agency to do make-up work for a made-up problem.”

Earlier this month, a fourth resident of The Villages retirement community – a Republican stronghold – was arrested on charges of voting more than once in the 2020 election. Of the four residents, three were registered Republicans and the fourth had no party affiliation.

Despite vast conspiracy theories promoted by the former president baked into campaign platforms across the US, there is no evidence of rampant fraud, and isolated incidents referred to law enforcement underscore the fact that it is already policed – and exceptionally rare.

The governor even conceded in the wake of 2020 elections that “the way Florida did it, I think inspires confidence, I think that’s how elections should be run.”

Carrie Boyd, policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund, told The Herald Tribune that the governor’s proposal is “designed to trap Floridians unjustly in the criminal legal system for trying to participate in democracy, perpetuate false narratives about elections, and then use those false narratives to push for additional restrictions to the ballot.”

Jonathan Diaz, a voting rights lawyer at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told The Washington Post that his “number one concern is that this is going to be used as a tool to harass or intimidate civic-engagement organizations and voters.”

Cecile Scoon, president of the League of Women Voters Florida, called such proposals “very chilling, very scary and very reminiscent of past governmental interference that was directed to Black voters.”

In a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland last week, Florida’s congressional Democrats pointed to several recent arrests on allegations of voter fraud in the state, “examples of the system working because these individuals were caught and held accountable,” they wrote in their letter to Mr Garland.

The members of Congress warned Mr Garland that the state “has seen a disturbing rise in partisan efforts at voter suppression” and expressed concern that “investigations into voting integrity are being politicized.”

The letter urged the US Department of Justice to intervene and “identify and stop any other patterns of voter suppression that threaten the integrity of our electoral process in the state of Florida.”

“These criminal acts were identified through the diligent work of local election officials with strong records of efficient, transparent, and lawful election facilitation,” they wrote. “Unfortunately, state officials in Florida are instead working to politicize our elections, blur existing lines of authority, and hamper the ability of local election officials to properly administer elections.”

In Texas, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton added six people and more than $2m to the state’s so-called election integrity unit, according to the Houston Chronicle.

The office did not uncover any evidence of widespread fraud during 2020 elections and it closed just three cases in 2021 – 14 fewer than in 2020, the newspaper reported.

Last year, Republican state legislators passed at least 32 new laws in 17 states to change the rules of election administration and strip oversight from election officials after filing at least least 262 such bills in 41 states, according to States United For Democracy.

At least 19 states passed 24 laws restricting ballot access, after GOP lawmakers filed more than 440 bills in 49 states in 2021 alone, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

“Harmful proposals to create new partisan bodies to oversee our voting process are exactly the kind of action that demand oversight as we work to ensure that our voting process is unquestionably trustworthy,” Florida’s congressional delegation wrote.