Ron DeSantis Gives Himself Even More Power To Rig Florida Elections

Florida's authoritarian Republican governor Ron DeSantis has signed a bill into law giving him control over a new Election Police Force. But that's just the beginning of what this sweeping new legislation will do, and the rest of the bill is actually even worse than the police force. Voter rolls will have to be "cleaned up" every single year, which is a code for purging voters. And common Get Out The Vote tactics will also now be illegal. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains how this bill will officially make Florida a permanent red state.

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

Yesterday, Florida's authoritarian Republican governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the legislation that officially effective immediately, by the way, gives him his election police force, which honestly is very bad news for Republicans here in the state of Florida as we have caught many, many Republicans since the 2020 election that have committed voter fraud, that have changed people's voter registrations from Democrat to Republican. So Republicans ought to actually be shaking in your boots because this is one that is definitely going to backfire on our idiot little governor. But here's the thing. While everybody has been focused reporting on the election police here in Florida, because obviously, yeah, that's a big deal and it is terrifying. You know, he's got his own little gustapo at this point. I beg you all to read the rest of the law because that's not even the worst part of it.

Let me read you the worst parts of this legislation that have been overshadowed because of the election police that Ron DeSantis has given himself. This is Senate bill 524, establishes the 25 person office of election crimes and security under the secretary of state's office to look into voting irregularities or illegalities. It bans ranked choice voting statewide, including in cities and counties. In a ranked choice voting system voters rank candidates by preference on their ballots rather than selecting just one. So he's limiting our choices here. He's making it near impossible for a third party candidate to win an election here in the state of Florida and I'm sorry, but that is a big, big deal. Limiting our democratic choices here in the state, yeah, that's a little bit worse than his little election police that are gonna have to start arresting Republicans very soon. Makes a series of tweaks to election procedures and stiffens criminal penalties for certain activities such as ballot harvesting.

That is the practice of one person or organization collecting a number of completed mail ballots from other people and delivering them to an elections officer dropbox. So if you in the state of Florida, go around and collect ballots that people have filled out, you know, mail in ballots and say, hey, I'll mail these for you. Guess what? You could now possibly go to jail. By the way, the so-called ballot harvesting is a massive part of get out the vote efforts, right? You get your mail-in ballot. Hell, you don't even have to worry about sending it back our organization, which by the way, these organizations are trustworthy, they're gonna come collect it and take it in for you. It's that simple. We're trying to make the process of voting easier and now DeSantis to make it not only harder, but make those practices illegal so we can put people in jail so that fewer people get to vote.

Because we all know who benefits, excuse me, when fewer people vote. Last one, it requires election supervisors to clean up voter rolls annually rather than every other year. Cleaning up the voter rolls entails removing deceased persons from the roll, checking the status of an active voters or voters whose addresses may have changed. Yeah, because that's not opening itself up for corruption at all. Is it? Oh, this person's inactive. Should we go to their home? Knock on.