Do I want just a hint of social democracy or a fresh infusion of fascism?
By Politics are so very complicated and boring! I guess I’ll have to watch the debate to figure out whether I want these people running the country:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s election police unit is investigating alleged fraud in signature gathering for the state’s upcoming abortion referendum in a move that critics say is designed to intimidate voters.
In the past week, two people reported that an agent from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement arrived at their homes and asked them about petitions they had signed months ago to add Amendment 4 to the November ballot.
One voter, Isaac Menasche, posted on his Facebook page Wednesday that a detective questioned him about his signature and showed him a folder containing 10 pages of his personal information.
“The experience left me shaken,” Menasche wrote, adding that he had signed the petition. “Troubling that so much resources were devoted to this.”
Menasche confirmed the content of the Facebook post to The Washington Post but declined to comment further.
The investigation comes as Democrats and election experts express concern that DeSantis is using the powers of the state to derail the referendum, which would nullify a six-week abortion ban the Republican governor signed into law last year. The state’s health-care agency recently launched a website that claims the amendment “threatens women’s safety.”
“They want people to stay home and to not vote,” Democratic state Rep. Fentrice Driskell said at a virtual news conference Monday. “They want people to read these articles and hear it on social media that the police showed up at somebody’s door and intimidated them and made them feel bad about signing an Amendment 4 petition.”
DeSantis defended the actions of his election police unit, saying Monday that the state received “a lot of complaints” about a petition-gathering group, which he did not name. He said the group had submitted “dozens of petitions” on behalf of dead people. A Florida Department of State spokesperson declined to answer a request for more details, pointing only to DeSantis’s remarks.
A friend points out that this stuff is straight out of Viktor Orban’s playbook:
The ostensible reason — that they are digging for evidence of fraud — is bad enough. They just want 1 person to say “What? I never signed that!” and they will try to invalidate the initiative.
But behind that is the clear message that if you think you have the right to oppose DeSantis, remember that he is watching everything you do and he runs the police.
Remember when anybody who suggested that Trumpism was morphing into a form of neo-fascism was told they were being totally hysterical?
Good times.