DeSantis’ Vote-Suppression Tactics Are Working in Florida


In May 2021 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 90, which effectively cleared the voter rolls of Florida citizens who had requested mail-in ballots. Previously, Florida voters could file one request for mail-in ballots and would receive one for any and all elections.

No more.

Although a federal judge removed several of the most egregious provisions of the law, it nonetheless is still suppressing mail-in voting, according to the Florida Reporter:

Studies show that voters who are registered to vote by mail are more likely to cast a vote.The impact on voting by mail from this new law is already coming into sharp focus: last year, Miami-Dade County had 438,000 mail ballot voters, but as of July 1st of this year, a mere 92,000 voters were enrolled in vote by mail. In Hillsborough County, only 70,000 voters are signed up to vote by mail as of July 1st, down from 320,000 before the new law went into effect. In Broward County, it’s even more dramatic: a recent review confirmed just 35,000 vote by mail sign-ups, compared to 428,000 last year. In Orange County, only 23,000 voters have requested mail-in ballots for the upcoming cycle after 140,000 voters used them in 2021.

Where Are We and How Did We Get Here?

cnn.com

In a subscribers-only piece in The Bulwark, Jonathan Last pretends we could go back in time to January 2017 and tell people that in six years:

  • Trump will have been impeached twice.
  • He will have been found guilty of rape by a jury of his peers.
  • He will have been soundly defeated for re-election, but refused to concede the loss.
  • In an effort to remain in power he will put in motion a vast conspiracy to overturn the result through extralegal methods.
  • When this conspiracy fails he will incite a violent insurrection in which he directs his armed supporters to invade the Capitol and prevent the certification of Electoral College votes.
  • He will be indicted in four separate criminal cases.
  • He will seek a return to the White House explicitly for the stated purpose of “retribution.”
  • And he will be leading the Republican field by >30 points.
  • “My point is that six years ago I don’t think many people on either side would have believed that today’s reality was likely. Or even possible. Yet here we are, actually living in something close to the worst-case scenario.

    “And yet we are so habituated to this dark reality that we’ve come to see it as normal.”

    Jesus Is too Woke for Trump’s Evangelicals

    eternitynews.com.au

    Hey, christianists! It’s like they say: “You can’t misspell ‘hypochristy’ without ‘Christ.'”

    Apparently, turning the other cheek don’t sit so well with our American evangelical brethren anymore. No, the literal Jesus of the literal Bible is simply too woke for 21st century Southern Baptists. Check this from an NPR interview with Russell Moore, a former leader in the Southern Baptists cult:

    It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — “turn the other cheek” — [and] to have someone come up after to say, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, “I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response would not be, “I apologize.” The response would be, “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.” And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.

    “[A]lmost every part of American life is tribalized and factionalized,” said the Baptist, who is not Catholic or Jewish or Muslim or Methodist or Christian Scientist or Mormon or — you get it.

    “I think if we’re going to get past the blood and soil sorts of nationalism or all of the other kinds of totalizing cultural identities, it’s going to require rethinking what the church is,” Moore told NPR.

    At Pensito, we are 100% in favor of “rethinking what the church is.”

    Ultra-Right Federalist Society Scholars: Fourteenth Amendment Makes Trump Ineligible to Run for Office

    Ultra-Right Federalist Scholars William Baude, left, and Michael Stokes Paulsen (Photos: Federalist Society)

    New York Times: “Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.

    “The professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long article to be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review….

    “[Baude] summarized the article’s conclusion: ‘Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6…’

    “Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern and Yale and a founder of the Federalist Society, called the article ‘a tour de force.’”

    DeSantis Replaces State Attorney with Federalist Society Judge

    Orlando Sentinel

    To diffuse claims of racism for groundlessly removing Monique Worrell, a Black state attorney who was elected by a two-to-one margin, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis replaced her with a Black judge who is a member of the Federalist Society. But, according to the Orlando Sentinel, Andrew Bain is also not a very good judge:

    In his time overseeing criminal cases in county court, Bain received low marks in a judicial qualifications poll by the Central Florida Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, ranking last among Orange County criminal judges, with respondents describing him as “state-leaning” or prosecution-biased.

    At a press conference announcing his appointment, Bain offered a word-salad nonexplanation of why he’s a member of the Federalist Society, a powerful group that is uncannily influential in getting presidents and governors to name conservatives to top judicial posts, including the Supreme Court:

    “I am a member simply for this reason: My grandmother was a sharecropper, so when she came time to harvest her harvest in her family and the landowner shorted her, she had no legal recourse because the judges made the laws,” he said. “And that’s purely unfair. And that stuff’s been going on forever.”
    […]

    Slate: DeSantis 3.0 ‘May Involve Fewer Depictions of Self as a Nazi Emperor God’

    DeSantis: Nazi Emperor God
    DeSantis: Nazi Emperor God

    Slate.com: “On Tuesday, the Daily Beast published a piece about a Twitter account called @DeSantisCams that is pro–Ron DeSantis and also, even by the standards of the contemporary American right, quite pro-Hitler.

    “Last weekend, for instance, the account published a video that culminates in an image of soldiers marching in lockstep toward the Florida governor, whose head turns into a rotating Sonnenrad, or sun wheel. The symbol was installed by Heinrich Himmler in the SS’s Wewelsburg castle and has been adopted in recent decades by white supremacists, including the individuals who carried out mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Buffalo, New York. Conservatives often argue that Democrats are being hysterical for saying that right-wing meme phenomena like the ‘OK’ hand gesture have fascist overtones; there would seem to be some difficulty involved in making that claim about a lightning bolt circle that was created by the leader of the SS for his occult Nazi castle.
    […]