Florida governor signs bill to create new police force targeting ‘voter fraud’
by Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Contributor
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill on April 25 to create a new police force that will focus on voter fraud. The move is a further indication that DeSantis is setting up for a run for President that will likely be an attempt to outsize the political persona of Donald Trump and his unorthodox politics.
Trump has falsely claimed that his seven million vote loss to President Biden was the result of voter fraud. Trump also lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 — by 3 million votes. But he won the electoral college map after winning Wisconsin and Florida.
DeSantis, a Republican, is running for reelection against former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, a Democrat. DeSantis is ahead in the polls by an average of 8 percentage points and the election is in November.
Even though voter fraud is rare, disinformation and deliberate misinformation about voter fraud is not. The Republican Party has made “voter fraud” a rallying cry while offering few actual examples of voter fraud in real life. Associated Press conducted an investigation that demonstrated that the 2020 presidential election “found fewer than 475 potential cases of voter fraud out of 25.5 million ballots cast in the six states where Trump and his allies disputed his loss to President Joe Biden.”
Republican officials in politically red states certified the 2020 election even though the White House, and in the case of Georgia, Trump personally, pressured officials to alter the election results in his favor.
It is unclear as to how a new police force for voter fraud will operate. But if the partisan politics of voting provides clues it is likely that the police force will be just as partisan as the voting laws Florida’s Governor has recently signed into law.
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