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Back in August 20 people were arrested in Florida as part of a sting operation on "voter fraud" heavily publicized by Gov. DeSantis. Each person had a felony conviction and voted, but I wrote about how each person was specifically told by election authorities that they were legally able to vote. The confusion stems from how felony voter right restoration was implemented in Florida, where the state insisted that everyone had to pay all outstanding fines while at the same time admitting it had no way of keeping track of all these fines.
A small update since then is that bodyworn video footage of the arrests has been released. The language in an arrest warrant issued by a court usually says something along the lines of "To every peace officer of blah blah, you are commanded to..." which means the decision to arrest is not discretionary. I've watched thousands of arrest videos by now and while the modal arrest is far less eventful that what the typical viral incident would have you believe, it's still an event that is inherently antagonistic. After all, the cop is placing handcuffs on you and taking you to jail, with serious retribution if you impede the process in any way.
I have never seen cops anywhere near as apologetic about an arrest as in the videos just released from Florida. They caught these people unaware outside of their homes, and as they explain the arrest warrant they pepper every sentence with "sir" and "m'am". When they explain that they're about to be handcuffed, they use "unfortunately" as a prefix. Thanks to qualified immunity along with the general deference courts give law enforcement, each cop would have had the legal authority to leg sweep each person and slam them to the ground if they displayed anything that could remotely be construed as resistance. Instead they take the time to calmly explain the process, including when they would likely be released, in a bid to secure as much of their cooperation as possible through what is understandably a distressing event for any person to go through. They're treated with astounding compassion. The people arrested start talking (of course they do), with one explaining how he was told he could legally vote, and the cop responds with "there's your defense". I've never seen a cop highlight legal defenses to the person they just arrested.
DeSantis is a Yale/Harvard educated former federal prosecutor. I would assume based on his background that he's not an idiot, and that he knows how criminal prosecutions work. If I keep my cynic hat on, DeSantis chose to make a big show of these arrests entirely as a means to appease the portion of the electorate that still believes the 2020 election was stolen and remains angry no one has gotten punished. But even so, what exactly was the follow-up supposed to be? Whatever charges one would levy against these people would require that you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knew they weren't allowed to vote but voted anyway, and how would any prosecutor counter the fact that election authorities approved their registration? What this does also just brings more attention to the confusing labyrinthian mess around court fines the state of Florida intentionally created as a hurdle for felons pursuing voter right restoration.
If the cops conducting the arrest are expressing this much skepticism about the charges, you can surmise how a random jury pool would react. These charges were patently frivolous from the very start but setting that aside they don't even make sense from the political grandstanding perspective. Bewildering.
Think on the meta level just a bit. As in, not about whether these twenty people themselves were or were not intentionally trying to commit a crime, and catching them is proof of anything.
From a pure signalling standpoint, if you want to prevent people from knowingly casting illegal votes and demonstrate that you are capable of enforcing this rule (i.e. detecting illegal votes), then yes, you have to arrest people who do cast illegal votes, even if they possess a defense for the action.
Especially since "I was told it was legal to cast my vote" is such an easy defense to invoke and hard to disprove otherwise. You show that you will STILL investigate such situations and try to verify the defense as valid.
Do you think that this action will, on the margins, increase or decrease the chances of someone attempting actual voter fraud in the 2022 elections in Florida?
Or would the effect be entirely minimal and worth disregarding?
Speaking purely from the political grandstanding perspective, it mostly makes DeSantis look silly and buffoonish: at the margin, it lost him votes, possibly even in future Republican primaries. You can talk about hypothetical second-order effects on marginal illegal voters all you want, but the public doesn't care, and it'll be hard to convince anyone that this escapade was DeSantis courageously trying to institute good policy despite any negative effects it might have on his grander political ambitions.
Does it make DeSantis look silly and buffoonish to his supporters, his detractors, the likely voters among them, the unlikely voters among them, the swing vote? Remember, every audience is seeing their own movie. It literally does not matter at all if a million people think this makes DeSantis look bad if they're not gonna vote for him anyway -- and it'd be worth earning all of their disapproval just to make 15,000 people on his side more likely to.. well, support him.
"But he might have alienated more independents than he did excite members of the base", you could argue. And maybe! The political calculations are certainly complex.. in theory.
In practice, though, I think everyone's collectively agreed that exciting the base beats infuriating the enemy, and these complex calculations aren't actually being worked out.
Election security is very important. But if people ask if they can vote and get told they can vote, arresting them seems to not help much. This is not getting us Voter ID. It just looks like the bureaucracy telling people one day they are doing things okay and the next "lol get fukt."
How the hell does a government bureaucracy run on not just the spoken word of a bureaucrat, but a convicted felons spoken memory of the spoken word of a bureaucrat?
Merely speaking a lie should be insufficient to cast an illegal ballot like its insufficient in every single other advanced country. Canada, the UK, France, you have to show ID and prove with physical documents your eligibility to vote. Address changed? Show the paperwork. Citizenship status changed? Show the paperwork. Name Changed? Show the paperwork.
Only in America is the fate of the nation riding on the honor system. And only in America would it be considered a scandal that you'd hold someone accountable for being demonstrably wrong in such a system.
"But he claims some rando he can't remember told him he could do it" We should totally remove the very last post facto enforcement mechanism we have that even pretends this is secure, because now that we've narrowed it down to just personal honor we find we're uncomfortable punishing people for being wrong on matters of honor.
I mean, I already said I wanted Voter ID.
So. Yeah.
If someone has their address change and they file the change-of-address form and they get mailed a new voter registration card at their new address, the bureaucracy better not come back after they vote and say "oh wait we double-checked our records and the form showed up 3 days late we never should have sent you that now we fuck you in the ass."
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