Florida will open up the first Office of Election Crimes and Security in the country after the state’s GOP-led House passed a bill on Wednesday night, despite opposition from critics who say the office will be a tool to “intimidate” voters.
The bill, which was approved in the Florida Senate last week, will now be sent to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ desk. DeSantis spokesperson Taryn Fenske told Politico this was a win for the governor.
“We’re very excited and thank the legislature for delivering on Governor DeSantis’ election security initiative,” Fenske said. “The legislature carried out our goal of making it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
But critics say the bill does just the opposite.
“I don’t believe we should have an elections police force at all,” Joe Scott, the elections supervisor for Broward County, told The Washington Post. “These are people who will be looking for crimes where there are none. That has the potential to intimidate a lot of voters and the organizations who try to help voters.”
However, the bill did fall short of DeSantis’ original request. It gave the governor less than half of the nearly $6 million he wanted to spend on hiring 52 people to investigate election malpractice, The Washington Post reported.
The newly approved office, which will be based in Tallahassee, will “initiate independent inquiries and [conduct] preliminary investigations into allegations of election law violations or election irregularities in this state,” according to the bill.
Yet, there is no evidence that election fraud is widespread in the Sunshine State or in the U.S. more widely. The bill’s opponents point to former President Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen as the motivation for bringing this legislation forward.
“It is very clearly an attempt to satiate a certain sector of the base that has been bombarded with misinformation about the 2020 election and the Big Lie,” Brad Ashwell, Florida state director of the advocacy group All Voting Is Local, told The Associated Press.
The office will also be required to present a yearly report to the governor, the state Senate president and the state’s speaker of the House, detailing the number of election fraud complaints as well as the number of investigations launched.
Under the new bill, ranked-choice voting will also be prohibited.