Republicans' Emails Prove Florida Voting Law Was All About Suppressing Democratic Voters

Emails and text messages obtained by Politico by Republican lawmakers in Florida have provided proof that the state's recent voter suppression bill - signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in an exclusive event aired on Fox News - was only about suppressing Democratic votes and NOT about rooting out fraud. This isn't a surprise to anyone on the Left, but the emails could easily help lawsuits seeking to get the law thrown out. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses these newly-released communications and what they mean.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Politico was able to get a hold of text messages and emails from Florida officials, Florida lawyers for the Republican party and elected Republican officials from the state of Florida that revealed that Florida's oppressive voting bill passed earlier this year was purely partisan. The emails and texts reveal that these Republicans were going back and forth with one another expressing the urgency to get this done because as they put it, you got a lot of Republicans up for reelection in 2022, including governor Ron DeSantis. So we need to clamp down on mail-in ballots now to erase the Democrats edge because we can't catch up to them. That's actually in one of the emails, what I just told you, erase the Democrats edge because we can't catch up to them. That was actually between two elected lawmakers here in the state of Florida.

If you ever needed a smoking gun to prove that Republicans were only engaging in partisan politics with these suppressive voting bills, uh, this is it. These documents and texts obtained by Politico are 100% it. And the thing they were scared about obviously was the mail-in ballots. Democrats outnumbered Republicans in terms of number of mail-in ballots submitted in the 2020 election. I mean, by hundreds of thousands, Democrats had that edge. So what Republicans wanted to do was they wanted to do a way with all current mail-in ballot requests in the state. Basically, if you would request a mail-in ballot for future elections, that would be erased. But instead, what they did was they didn't do away with it all together. They said, okay, but you can only request one at a time. You can't request future elections. You can only request for the next election and all the requests that had already been made did in fact get grandfathered in.

But if you made a request for future ballots, be warned, that request is now no longer there. You will have to make another request in order to get that mail-in ballot. And of course, that's something that Republicans in this state aren't actively out there telling people. So if you requested a ballot in 2020 and said, yes, I would like to do this from now on, that old request is gone because you already had your one election. You would most likely need to request again for 2022, do it again for 2024 and so on and so forth. But folks that wasn't the only thing Republicans were worried about because these documents also tell us that Republicans were worried that this could backfire on them because they understand that yeah, Democrats beat them out on mail-in ballots in 2020. But, typically that's not how it goes here in the state of Florida. And a lot of the ultra elderly Republican base in this state actually votes by mail.

So Republicans are now worried and they were worried before that they may have shot themselves in the foot because now they have a base that doesn't understand that they now have to go make a new request to receive a mail-in ballot. And it may not hurt them on the national level when we have another election in 2024. May not hurt them at the gubernatorial level. But it could easily kill them at the local level. That's actually what the emails say. You know, this could hurt us at the local level.