Cerabino: That mail-in ballot for the Florida governor's race next year? It might not be in the mail

Republican lawmakers in Tallahassee have begun cooking up a voter-suppression bill on mail-in voting that's bound to help Gov. Ron DeSantis’ re-election bid next year. 

Mail-in voting in Florida has traditionally favored Republicans in statewide elections, with party voters consistently outnumbering registered Democrats. 

Until last year.

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In 2014, Republicans in Florida enjoyed a 127,668-vote edge in mail-in votes — which was nearly double the 66,127-vote margin of victory for Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s re-election over Democrat Charlie Crist.

In former President Donald Trump’s own election in 2016, Republicans in Florida had a 58,244-vote advantage in mail-in votes, which was more than half the statewide margin in Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton.

Two years later, Ron DeSantis won his race for governor over Andrew Gillum by a slim margin of 32,454 votes in a race when 8.2 million Floridians voted. DeSantis was helped by the 54,208-vote cushion Republicans had over Democrats in mail-in votes, a cushion bigger than his margin of victory.

But the script got flipped in 2020. 

The COVID-19 epidemic, which tended to be taken far more seriously by Democrats than Republicans, turned many in-person Democratic voters to mail-in voters. Registered Democrats in Florida cast 683,477 more votes by mail than did registered Florida Republicans.

And more importantly: When they registered to vote by mail in 2020, they took advantage of a state law that allowed them to check a box to get mail-in ballots automatically for the next general election, too.

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That’s the gubernatorial election in 2022. So a good percentage of the 2.1 million Florida Democrats who voted by mail in 2020 are already slated to get mail-in ballots to vote in the race that DeSantis hopes to win next year.

That doesn’t bode well for DeSantis. Do the math: There was a 737,685-vote swing on mail-in ballots toward the Democrats from 2018 to 2020.

But what could be done? The Democratic voters in the state have already opted to get mail-in ballots for 2022. They’ll automatically receive them in the mail next year.

It would be nothing short of outright voter suppression to come up with a way to stop the mail.

Cue the Florida Legislature.

This week, the Florida Senate’s Committee on Ethics and Elections passed a bill along party lines that will retroactively cancel the delivery of mail-in ballots to voters who signed up to receive them through the 2022 general election.

This new hurdle to democracy can’t even be justified by fraud, because the state’s elections officials and Republican lawmakers themselves have been crowing about the integrity of Florida’s November election, which saw 4.8 million ballots cast by mail.

No, this would take some special bit of chicanery to argue for fixing something that isn’t broken. They would have to say that something’s not a problem, so we have to address it.

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The bill’s sponsor, State Sen. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, took a stab at this. 

“I’m always the guy looking down the road to what can happen to a good idea,” he said.  

Too much of a good idea can be a bad thing, I guess. We’d better hobble it while it’s working so well. 

Baxley, at times, seemed to be confused about his own bill and why it was needed.

He talked about seeing lots of election material in the garbage at post offices, as if he were making a fraud argument. And then he talked about how he really likes to vote in person.

“I know how people my age are confused by mail,” said Baxley, who is 68.

Wait. He’s just looking out for older people? Aren't older voters the ones who really like to vote by mail?

Then he started talking about if we allow Floridians to get a mail-in ballot for next year, they could be dead by then.

Or they could move.

“I don’t want somebody stealing my vote by mistake,” he said. 

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So we’re back to fraud, the fraud that doesn’t exist. None of this makes any sense on a rational basis.

“This is not trying something new,” State Sen. Tina Polsky, D-Boca Raton, told her fellow lawmakers on the committee. “This is going backwards.”

Voting rights groups, including the League of Women Voters, oppose the bill. 

“This is the opposite of what we should be doing,” Brad Ashwell, the Florida director of the voting rights group, All Voting is Local, told the legislators. “We should make the vote-by-mail option permanent until voters opt out.”

If the bill simply said that going forward, Florida voters would be allowed to sign up for mail-in ballots for just one general election, instead of two, as the current law allows, it would be bad.

But you could make an argument that voter suppression wasn’t the main motivation.

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What makes this a blatant voter-suppression bill is the retroactive provision in it that would deactivate the mail-in ballots already in the pipeline for the DeSantis election.

With no money budgeted, it would be left to local elections officials to come up with the resources to notify all those voters that they won’t be receiving a mail-in ballot unless they make another request.  

Without that notification, those mail-in voters will have no idea that the ballots they were expecting in the mail for the governor’s election won’t come.

This is bound to decrease dramatically the number of mail-in votes in that election and wipe out that disadvantage DeSantis would have. 

Which is the whole point.

“It makes sense to reset and allow people the chance to decide how they want to move forward in the next cycle,” Baxley said. 

I guess he means “decide again.”  

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You sure you want to vote the way you already said you wanted to vote? We’re going to assume you changed your mind, unless you contact us. 

Oops, too late. The window to request a mail-in ballot is over. 

Good luck voting in person in your heavily Democratic South Florida voting precincts. We have some other voter suppression ideas to hamper you there, too.

fcerabino@pbpost.com

@FranklyFlorida