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Florida Republican State Senators moved forward with a list of electoral reforms on Friday which includes the creation of an election security office, the first of its kind under control of Governor Ron DeSantis, according to The Miami Herald.
During a late-night session on Friday, the Florida Senate voted 23 to 15 to send the electoral bill to the House, where it is expected to be voted on and sent to the governor next week.
Democrats briefly debated against the legislation, while a single Republican senator pointed to a number of individual cases of fraud, most of them allegedly committed by Republicans or Republican agents, since the elections of 2020.
Although Republicans in the state passed another sweeping election law in May of last year, DeSantis also made election reform a top priority for this legislative session.
Both efforts come after the elections of 2020 in Florida passed without major issues, and state Republicans touted them as a “gold standard” for election management.
Legislation is about to become in the first major election-related bill to pass this year in a critical battleground state, joining the wave of new election laws that add more voting rights restrictions approved in several states, according to The New York Times.
Until 04 January, the legislators of 27 states have introduced, previously introduced, or passed more than 250 election bills with restrictive provisions, compared to 80 bills of this type in 24 states a year ago, according to the Brenan Center for Justice.
The new Florida election bill would create a permanent office of election crimes within the Department of State, which would make Florida one of the first states to have an agency dedicated exclusively to election crimes and voter fraud, despite that such crimes are extremely rare in the United States.
An investigation by The Associated Press last year found fewer than 475 Potential Fraud Reports at 27.5 million votes cast in the elections p for president in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
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The new office would help the Florida secretary of state’s office investigate complaints and allegations, initiate its own independent investigations, and oversee a fraud hotline election.
The bill would also increase the penalties for those who collect and send more than two absentee ballots, from a misdemeanor to a felony.
In addition to the new Bureau of Electoral Crimes and Security, the bill adds other new restrictions on voting,
including prohibition of ranked-choice voting; increase the cap on fines for third-party registration groups of $1,000 to $50,000; expand the ban on private funding for election administration to include the “cost of any litigation” and replace references to “drop boxes” with “secure ballot receiving stations.”
Voting rights groups are concerned that the continued criminalization of the voting process may scare voters away from participating and make officials electoral fear of being prosecuted for honest mistakes.
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