Although most leftists and many in the mainstream media would have you believe that ensuring election integrity is extraneous, it is absolutely paramount to a well-functioning democracy.
Without it, as the Metallica song goes: Nothing else matters.
Given this, we the people should applaud any and all states that take commonsense measures to ensure greater electoral integrity while castigating states that do the opposite.
Fortunately, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill into law that unapologetically adheres to the former.
According to DeSantis, “Florida took action this legislative session to increase transparency and strengthen the security of our elections.”
He added, “Floridians can rest assured that our state will remain a leader in ballot integrity. Elections should be free and fair, and these changes will ensure this continues to be the case in the Sunshine State.”
So, what changes are DeSantis referring to?
First and foremost, the new law reinforces existing state law that requires all voters present a form of government-issued identification when voting in-person.
Voter ID, as it is commonly called, is supported by a vast majority of the American people.
According to a recent article on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website, “voter ID laws — which Republicans have pushed for years — are quite popular in general. In another national poll out this week from Selzer & Co./Grinnell College, 56 percent of adults favored keeping laws that require people to show a photo ID before voting, while just 36 percent wanted to eliminate them. And this isn’t an opinion Americans suddenly adopted amid 2020’s specious claims of voter fraud. In fall 2018, the Pew Research Center found that 76 percent of Americans favored requiring everyone to show a government-issued photo ID in order to vote, versus only 23 percent who opposed it.”
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Second, the new Florida law bans ballot harvesting.
CBS News defines ballot harvesting as, “volunteers or campaign workers can go directly to the homes of voters, collect the completed ballots, and drop them off en masse at polling places or election offices.”
Ballot harvesting is a recipe for massive electoral mischief. Even CBS News admits so: “In some states, ballot harvesters can be paid hourly for their work collecting ballots. Critics fear that in states without restrictions on who can return a ballot on someone else's behalf, a third party could take advantage of the system by tampering with or discarding the ballots.”
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the new Florida law “bans the mass mailing of ballots, ensuring that vote-by-mail ballots are only sent to the individuals that requested them, and only if requested for each election cycle they intend to vote by mail.”
This aspect of the new law is significant because under the guise of COVID-19, several states (unlawfully) sent millions of ballots to voters who had never requested a mail-in ballot in the first place.
Moreover, most states’ election rolls are hopelessly outdated, meaning that untold numbers of ballots were sent to addresses where the “registered” voter no longer resides. We will simply never know what became of millions of mail-in ballots that were sent to such addresses in the 2020 election.
Fortunately, that will not happen in Florida anytime soon.
Like Georgia, Florida’s new law has been tarred and feathered by the left and their minions in the mainstream media as an effort of Jim Crow-esque voter suppression. That is a lie.
Florida’s new law does absolutely nothing to suppress voting. Yet, it does a lot to ensure that future elections in the Sunshine State are as free and fair as possible.
After all, every vote that is cast under false pretenses cancels a vote cast in good faith. That is the epitome of voter suppression.
Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is senior editor at The Heartland Institute.
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