Florida Republicans Rewrite The Law To Make It Easier To Arrest People For Voting

After being publicly humiliated over his "voter fraud" arrests from a few months ago, Ron DeSantis and the Republicans that control Florida decided to rewrite laws in the state so that the burden of determining whether someone is eligible to vote is now on the VOTER, instead of the state. This came about just in time for the midterms, and it absolves the state of any liability for incorrectly issuing someone a ballot. This will likely not stand up in court, but it'll definitely impact the midterms, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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

After Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was roundly humiliated with his round of arrests of alleged voter fraud felons here in the state of Florida. He decided along with the Republicans that control this state that they were just gonna change the rules. Now, in case you're not familiar, here is what happened originally, right? Ron DeSantis gets his little election police force. He goes out and makes a public spectacle of arresting all these people, most of them Democrats, and most of them black. And as we showed in the footage that was released a week or two ago, they were very confused as as to why they were being arrested in the first place because all of them told us same story. That same story was that the folks at the voting place, and the folks, by the way, in Tallahassee, actually approved their voter registrations. So they didn't do anything wrong, right?

They didn't intentionally commit the crime. There was no intent. Therefore, there is no crime because the screw up wasn't with the people who voted. The screw up was with the people in Ron DeSantis own administration. And that's what was so embarrassing for Ron. So again, he and his Republicans that control this state with an iron fist decided to simply rewrite the law. And as of about a month ago, everybody here in the state of Florida that is on probation is now required to sign a document that says this. By signing this letter, the updated form states you agree that you are solely responsible for determining if you are legally able to register to vote, and that you must solely determine if you are lawfully qualified to vote.

So they're shifting the burden from DeSantis own people who had already screwed up onto the voters themselves. And by the way, there's about 150,000 people in the state of Florida today who are currently on probation. Not sure how many of them had to sign this letter because again, it's only been out there for about a month or two. But it was in response to DeSantis being humiliated and his own administration having to admit, yeah, okay, we screwed up. But my question is, is it really that hard to not screw this up? I mean, we're, we're living in the digital age here, folks. You would think that when somebody goes to register to vote and they type their name into the little computer, a little warning should pop up that says, Uhoh, this person is not eligible to vote. How? How is that difficult? That should be the thing that happens. It should be like the little clippy guy from Microsoft Word, like, Looks like you're trying to vote illegally. Would you like some help with that? But no, we, we can't even have that apparently here in the state of Florida. We have to leave it to these people who have no frigging clue how the law works, because Republicans have changed it so many times.

And now if they screw up, it's on them. Now, by signing this document, they're swearing that they are gonna do their due diligence to determine whether or not they're eligible to vote. And because our state system isn't going to tell them if they're eligible to vote, they have no way of actually knowing, which means most of them are simply not gonna vote. And that's the plan. That's the goal. That is what these Republicans in Florida want. They don't wanna be embarrassed again, They want to throw people in jail. But if they can't have that, the next best thing is just not having these people vote for Democrats at all.