‘Devastating’: Florida Republicans worried about 2022 as they crafted election law
Emails and text messages undercut the GOP’s claim Florida’s election overhaul wasn’t political.
TALLAHASSEE — Florida Republicans this spring insisted a contentious new election law curtailing access to ballot boxes was needed to prevent electoral fraud. It was not, they said, an attempt to gain a partisan advantage.
But a raft of internal emails and text messages obtained by POLITICO show the law was drafted with the help of the Republican Party of Florida’s top lawyer — and that a crackdown on mail-in ballot requests was seen as a way for the GOP to erase the edge that Democrats had in mail-in voting during the 2020 election. The messages undercut the consistent argument made by Republicans that the new law was about preventing future electoral fraud.
The law — labeled “Jim Crow 2.0” by some Democrats — was passed at the strong urging of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed the bill at an exclusive event aired by Fox News. It advanced even as local election officials, including Republicans, criticized the measure after running a trouble-free election in 2020. One official went so far as to call it “slap in the face” while one north Florida supervisor recently told DeSantis he was resigning at the end of this month in part to oppose “continuous changes” in election laws.
Florida was just one of several GOP-controlled states that enacted voting restrictions in the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s loss and his unsubstantiated complaints about voter fraud, although it isn’t as restrictive as laws passed in Georgia and Texas. When debating the bill in the waning moments of this year’s legislative session, Republican Party of Florida chair and state Sen. Joe Gruters repeatedly said the bill would “make it as easy as possible to vote, and hard as possible to cheat.”
Yet in one remarkable text exchange obtained by POLITICO, Gruters and lead House sponsor state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia (R-Spring Hill) went back-and-forth over proposals to shorten how long mail-in ballot requests are valid.
Gruters defended a Senate proposal to cancel all existing mail-in ballot requests, saying that it would be “devastating” for Republicans to keep them valid heading into the 2022 election when DeSantis and other state GOP officials are up for reelection. More than 2.18 million Democrats used mail-in ballots compared to 1.5 million Republican voters during the 2020 election where Trump easily won Florida. Part of that was due to the ongoing pandemic, as Democrats strongly encouraged voters to change their habits nationwide.
“We cannot make up ground. Trump campaign spent 10 million. Could not cut down lead,” Gruters wrote to Ingoglia, who had been chair of the Republican Party of Florida before Gruters.
Gruters (R-Sarasota) also said it would hurt the GOP in non-partisan races, noting that “our school board member got killed” in a local race. Gruters this week filed legislation that would ask voters to make school board races partisan.
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In the spring, Florida Republicans insisted a contentious new election law limiting access to ballot boxes wasn’t political.
We obtained internal emails and texts that undercut that claim. https://t.co/K8gET3iPFH
— POLITICO (@politico) September 21, 2021Of course, these election laws are partisan and political. The GOP in PA passed an election overhaul bill that would have made it harder to vote by mail in an attempt to curb voting by Democrats. Fortunately, the Democrat governor vetoed it. Now the GOP here has gone back to trying to nullify the November election with a “fraudit.” My guess is that they will try again with the election overhaul bill if they can get a Republican governor when the current governor leaves office.
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