Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared Wednesday that he will create a new full-time state law enforcement bureau that will concentrate on election crimes, a violation that hasn’t plagued Florida since the 2000 presidential election, Politico reports.
In the continuing Republican effort to impede the ability of citizens to vote and to quash voter turnout, DeSantis has pushed state lawmakers to pass oppressive voter registration laws and restrict the ability of voters to cast ballots quickly and conveniently. DeSantis also wants the Republican-controlled state legislature to pass a law that requires local election officials to purge voter rolls of anyone deemed ineligible to vote 100 days before an election, significantly reducing the amount of time someone has to appeal such a removal, which must be appealed to a state board run personally by the Governor.
The new law enforcement office will cost nearly $6 million, according to a document obtained by POLITICO. Since 2016, there have been six cases of people prosecuted for voting twice in an election.
“I guarantee you this: The first person that gets caught, no one is going to want to do it again after that,” said DeSantis at a West Palm Beach event billed as a “press conference” but featured dozens of DeSantis supporters who loudly applauded the governor. At one point, the crowd cheered “Let’s go Brandon” — a conservative rallying cry against President Joe Biden, Politico reports.
A database of alleged voter fraud cases assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation found just 1,334 alleged instances of voter fraud nationally since 1979. Most of these are voter registration issues, with people having registered twice or illegally registered when they were ineligible to vote. In that time, more than 1.2 billion votes have been cast in presidential elections alone nationally, meaning 0.0001% of the votes would have been questionable if all the cases listed by Heritage were fraudulent votes (which they aren’t).