The 2020 Presidential race catapulted the issue of election integrity to the forefront of the American political debate.
Governor Ron DeSantis promised to make Florida the “gold standard for elections.”
Now Democrats are fuming over the letter hundreds of thousands of Florida voters received.
Ron DeSantis made it part of his mission to strengthen election integrity in Florida.
In early 2021, DeSantis signed a bill that banned ballot harvesting in Florida.
Ballot harvesting is a process that allows operatives to collect tens of thousands of ballots and drop them off at locations around the district, making it ripe for abuse.
“I have what we think are the strongest election integrity measures in the country,” DeSantis said at the time. “We’re making sure we’re enforcing voter ID , we’re also banning ballot harvesting, and we’re not gonna let political operatives go and get satchels of votes to dump them in some drop box.”
Along with outlawing ballot harvesting, the law also banned the mass mailing of unsolicited ballots to voters, meaning Floridians have to request an absentee ballot if they want to vote that way.
“We’re also prohibiting mass mailing of balloting,” DeSantis also said at the time. “We’ve had absentee voting in Florida for a long time. You request the ballot. You get it. And you mail it in. But to just indiscriminately send them out is not a recipe for success.”
Democrats and their media allies reacted with outrage when DeSantis signed the legislation, accusing him of infringing on the rights of minority voters.
But during the Midterm elections, thanks to the new law, all votes in Florida were counted by midnight without any controversies or scandals.
And now hundreds of thousands of Florida voters just received a letter in the mail informing them that their requests for mail-in ballots were canceled due to the law signed by DeSantis.
“The change is part of a suite of new restrictions on voting by mail – including new identification requirements and ballot drop box limits – Republicans passed after the 2020 election,” the Guardian reported. “Previously, Florida voters could elect to automatically receive a mail-in ballot for every election for up to four years,” it continued, adding that “the new measure canceled nearly all of the standing requests on file at the end of 2022.”
The new law only allows voters to automatically receive a mail-in ballot for up to two years instead of four.
This resulted in a massive drop in the number of voters signed up to automatically receive a mail-in ballot.
In Democrat stronghold Miami-Dade County, 438,000 vote-by-mail requests expired on January 1.
As of January 31, only 24,000 had renewed their mail-in ballot request.
In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, 316,000 voters received a letter in December informing them that their request was about to expire.
By the end of January, the office had just under 49,000 vote-by-mail requests on file.
Mass mailings of unsolicited ballots is one of the questionable practices that needlessly raises questions about election integrity in voters’ minds.
But Ron DeSantis is cleaning up the system in Florida and turned the Sunshine State into the “gold standard for elections.”
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
