DeSantis attacks elections, signing Florida version of SAVE Act into law

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed Florida’s state version of the sweeping anti-voting SAVE America Act into law Wednesday. The law will impose new voting restrictions requiring voters to prove their citizenship status and also remove student ID as an acceptable form of voter identification.

Voting rights groups immediately filed a lawsuit challenging the measure and warning that it will disenfranchise eligible voters. 

In rambling remarks after the signing, DeSantis called into question the results of the 2020 presidential election, which President Donald Trump is attempting to relitigate, and sounded many of the same notes as election deniers who back the president’s attacks on free and fair elections.

“We saw what happened in the 2020 election, in some of these states where they had the mass mail balloting. You had ballot harvesting, Zuckerbucks,” the governor said. “You had all these different things [that] were happening where no one knew what the hell was going on.” 

“Zuckerbucks” — a prominent term among election deniers — alludes to GOP outrage after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated hundreds of millions of dollars to help fund election administration during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Widely viewed as a possible Republican candidate for president in 2028, DeSantis boasted that Florida had banned “Zuckerbucks” and insinuated that the donations had been an attempt to take over election administration.

“What they would do is they would go to, like, Milwaukee and they would give people (money) to actually run the election from this ‘nonprofit.’ And so they’re going to harvest ballots in Democrat areas, basically, and they’re going to administer in Democrat areas. And it’s like, wait a minute. Elections are a government function. You’re subcontracting out to some PAC or some nonprofit that’s got hundreds of millions of dollars?” DeSantis said, before conceding that “there wasn’t a lot of Zuckerbucks in Florida, to be frank.” 

DeSantis also hailed the state office he created to prosecute election crimes.

“We’ve now brought more prosecutions for voter fraud in Florida since that office was created than probably everywhere else in the country combined at this point,” he claimed.

“What I’ve found is if people know there’s going to be accountability, then doing any shenanigans — it’s just not worth it. So we’ve put the kibosh on that,” DeSantis said, unironically proclaiming that he had successfully rooted out voter fraud in Florida as he was signing into a law a measure that aims to crack down on voter fraud.

DeSantis also boasted that Florida voter rolls are updated annually and voters are required to show identification to request a mail ballot. 

“We’ve also banned ballot harvesting in the state of Florida, which that’s a very bad practice,” he said, complaining that voting had devolved into “someone with a satchel of votes just dumping these in some drop box in the middle of town somewhere that’s unattended.” 

“What a farce,” he added. 

DeSantis went on to slam states like California for offering universal mail ballots. 

“They just send a ballot to everybody indiscriminately, whether you ask for it or not. That’s not absentee voting. That’s just sending these things out. And these ballots will just float around in the ether in these states,” DeSantis said, complaining that renters in Las Vegas will receive multiple ballots addressed to former tenants. “They don’t update the voting rolls.”

The governor also highlighted his own successes at making voting more difficult for Floridians. 

“We effectuated the removal of the supervisor of elections in both Palm Beach and Broward counties. And that was important to clean house,” DeSantis said to applause from the crowd.

“But we also just understood that it’s very important that when the polls close, you know how many votes have been cast and then you count them. What you don’t want is to have 100,000 votes come in, somehow be found a day or two after, or three days after,” DeSantis added, blasting California’s lengthy period of accepting ballots after election day. 

The Florida governor also boasted that his appointments to the state supreme court had transformed the bench. 

“When I got elected, we had probably the most liberal supreme court in the country,” DeSantis said. “Now I’ve put six on and we have the most conservative supreme court in the country.” 

That conservative supreme court will likely come in handy in the coming months: DeSantis has called a legislative session for late next month to pass a new congressional gerrymander, despite the state’s voter-approved ban on gerrymandering.

Previous rulings by the Florida Supreme Court have already undermined the ban.