In a scathing opinion piece on Saturday morning, the editorial board of the Washington Post trashed Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) for his plan to create an “election police squad” that board suggests will be used to disrupt elections and scare voters away.
According to the board, the DeSantis proposal reeks of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn election results at the state level with them labeling the Florida Republican’s efforts a deliberate move to “poison democracy.”
Pointing out that DeSantis wants the Florida legislature to “pony up $6 million to hire 52 people for his election police squad — which, naturally, would be under the governor’s control and would investigate allegations of election crimes submitted by “government officials or any other persons,” the editors then warned, “If Mr. Trump had his way, government investigators would no doubt be impounding Dominion Voting Systems election machines and grilling election officials in Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania based on outlandish allegations about the 2020 vote. Whether Florida’s voting cops would field tips from partisans acting in bad faith or dupes who really believe that fraud is ubiquitous in U.S. elections, it is not hard to foresee them harassing election officials or voting rights groups who are simply trying to help people to vote.”
The editors added, “Mr. DeSantis’s proposal would be similar to an anti-voting law Texas lawmakers passed recently, which would threaten election workers with criminal penalties for transgressions as mild as proactively offering voters mail-in ballot applications. In both cases, the effect is to intimidate people into thinking twice about doing anything they fear state authorities might construe as illegal.”
They then concluded, “Mr. DeSantis, trying to rise from the former president’s shadow, looks as though he is trying to out-Trump Mr. Trump. Both seek to cater to a GOP base among whom fake allegations of fraud are not just believed, but considered a critical national crisis… Proposals such as Mr. DeSantis’s would only work to poison America’s democracy.”
You can read more here.