Ron DeSantis's nasty little stunt of bringing illegal voting charges against 20 Floridians with prior felony convictions seems to have worked. Eligible voters are refusing to register, despite the constitutional amendment that restored ex-felons' voting rights, because they're afraid of going back to prison. Via HuffPost:
“We’ve already encountered other individuals who have said, ‘Look, I’m afraid to vote,’” said Mike Gottlieb, a Democratic state legislator who’s on the legal defense team for one of the men facing charges.
“I have not encountered in the past this many voters calling, concerned that they may be prosecuted or what-have-you for voter fraud,” Mark Earley, Leon County’s supervisor of elections, told News Service of Florida this week. “And these are all eligible voters that have contacted me.”
Gottlieb said he believed that DeSantis’ press conference, held in a courtroom in Florida’s bluest county, Broward, was “specifically designed to disenfranchise Democratic voters in Broward County” ― an accusation that a Florida Department of State spokesperson called “blatantly false.”
As you may recall, Florida Republicans did everything they could think of to stop this amendment from passing -- and when it did, they added on all sorts of conditions to make it unworkable. The courts rebutted them, and now DeSantis came up with this.
Remember: Republicans don't like democracy. They have to cheat to win.
