The Republican-controlled Florida legislature passed a bill on Wednesday that would create a special elections police force meant to monitor elections at the behest of far right Gov. Ron DeSantis said that he would sign it into law.
The bill would create an Office of Election Crimes and Security in the Department of State. It is overseen and managed by DeSantis. The office, which would have 25 members, would allow DeSantis to appoint10 police officers assigned to investigate election crimes — Despite the fact experts have repeatedly proved that election fraud exists doesn’t exist at a scaleThis would even approach influencing election results.
To investigate voter fraud, it is necessary to appoint officers to observe elections. nakedly fascist. This move is indicative of the fact that the U.S. is in fascism’s “legal phase,” as fascism scholar Jason StanleyNot noted in The GuardianEnde of last year
The bill is the most extreme yet in Republicans’ push to suppress voters en masse, and voting rights advocates say that it will disproportionately affect Black voters.
“The governor’s personal goon force will exist to do only one thing: intimidate Black voters,” Walter ShaubOn Twitter,, senior ethics fellow for Project on Government Oversight, stated:
“It’s also gonna be a felony to take your sick grandma’s ballot to a drop box for her, unless you strap her in a cart and wheel her down there with you,” Shaub continued, referencing the fact that the bill makes it a felony for a voter to bring other people’s ballots to a dropoff location, which would disproportionately affect disabled or elderly people. You could face a fine up to $50,000 or five years imprisonment.
Black voters were already represented in the voting booth even before Republicans passed a stringent set of voter suppression laws. punished harshly and disproportionatelyThey were accused of election fraud in cases where they made a simple error. Police violence is also more common against black people. surveillance.
Republicans claim — They have been doing so for over a decade. pass dozens of voter suppression bills across the country — The new bill concerns election integrity. But the laws are actually an extreme reaction to former President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020, and an attempt to give Republican lawmakers more control over election results in the future.
Republicans haven’t provided any evidenceThe issue of widespread voter fraud is real. Although increased voter suppression laws by Republicans have alarmingly alarmed voting rights advocates in the past, the current bill is one the most stark indicators yet that the GOP has a problem with voter fraud. Openly accepting authoritarianism.
“Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis is taking Orwell’s 1984 and running with it into a despotic dystopia of his own feverish imagining with his hoped-for, first-in-the-nation creation of an Office of Election Crimes and Security to ensure ‘elections are conducted in accordance with the rule of law,’ though, in fact, they already are,” wrote Abby ZimetFor Common Dreams.
The blatant voter suppression is just one example of the right’s increasing embrace of facism; as Henry Giroux notedFor Truthout in November, DeSantis and the GOP’s attacks on education, and their efforts to punish educators for teaching about race, LGBTQ issues, and diversity, are also a sign of rising fascism on the right.
Republicans’ attacks on public and higher education are “closely aligned to a fascist politics that despises anyone who holds power accountable and sees as an enemy anyone who fosters liberating forms of social change or attempts to resist the right wing’s politics of falsehoods and erasure,” Giroux wrote.
