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The behaviour of the current President demonstrates that you would need to amend the Constitution to make it non-pardonable, of course - otherwise you get away with it if your candidate (for President or Governor, at least) wins.
It is a good idea in principle, but the problem is that the decline in public confidence in US elections is not driven by actual fraud, and definitely not by fraud that could be proven to the criminal standard but is currently being under-punished. It is driven by widespread sloppiness, corner-cutting, incompetence, and insecurity that means losing candidates can spam plausible fraud allegations and election officials can't refute them.
Announcing that you are going to start hanging the people doing the election fraud and then not finding any of them will further reduce confidence in the system. This is a general problem with making highly-visible solutions to non-existent problems a key part of your politics.
The one thing I don't think that the architects of our Democratic processes realized was that literal Trillions of Dollars would become tied up in the outcomes that can swing with <100,000 votes.
And yet, I've lived in Florida long enough to see it go from being THE SINGULAR EXAMPLE of sloppy election processes (2000 was the year of 'hanging chads') to running effectively flawless elections that report on time and accurately. The state has only gotten more populous since then, too.
Its like so many complaints about social problems are disproven with a straightforward counterexamples.
"Oh man violent crime is complex and multi-factorial, you can't just arrest your way to safety." Why'd it work for El Salvador?
"Bureaucratic waste is inevitable, and achieving real cuts to government spending is futile because all the incentives run the other way." Why'd it work for Argentina?
"Elections are complicated and chaotic, and counting millions of votes quickly AND accurately isn't viable in many places. Incompetence will always seep in." Why'd it work for Florida?
So maybe the solution is to just send Desantis on a tour to every single state with fucked up elections and he can show them precisely what to fix.
Its clearly not non-existent. And if merely announcing the penalty is sufficient to scare people from doing it, so much the better.
That was actually the argument I made back when Desantis put together his election fraud task force or what-have-you.
Merely being aware that there's people out looking for it is a disincentive.
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