Adam Serwer, The Atlantic: “The political leadership of Florida is today gripped by a new ‘lost cause.’ Despite the fact that Donald Trump triumphed in the Sunshine State in 2020, in an election that Governor Ron DeSantis called ‘the smoothest, most successful election in the country,’ the Republican-controlled legislature imposed a series of new voting restrictions in the aftermath of the election. The impetus for these restrictions was the falsehood that Trump had won reelection but had been deprived of victory by ‘voter fraud.’ Trump, along with his allies in the right-wing media, has inundated conservative voters with ludicrous claims that the election was ‘rigged.’ These claims cannot be proved, because they are false; in fact, the Trump camp has always known that they were false, and that their supporters would believe them nonetheless.”

“The allegations, though, need not be substantiated in any factual sense, because they are fundamentally an expression of the conviction that Trump should have won, not because he actually won the most votes but because the other side’s votes simply should not count. This belief justifies not merely restrictions on the right to vote but the right to simply overturn elections, as Trump supporters attempted to do when they ransacked the Capitol on January 6. The novel restrictions cannot be a solution to endemic voter fraud, a problem that DeSantis’s boasts implicitly acknowledge does not exist. They are a solution to a different problem: the fact that the other side gets to vote at all. None of these attempts to restrict the franchise has been as overtly racist or close to as successful as the efforts of the Redeemers. But as long as the risk of competitive elections exists, a party driven by the belief that its rivals are illegitimate will seek to eliminate them. That this effort is today led by the Republican Party, during Reconstruction the defender of Black rights in the South, is one of history’s great and tragic ironies.”