A Florida resident named Isaac Menasche received a home visit this September from a police officer asking whether he’d signed a petition for a ballot measure.
The petition, which Menasche had indeed signed, was for a November initiative overturning a strict abortion ban that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed last year. Now the governor is attempting to discredit those signatures using state-funded cops. According to the Tampa Bay Times, state law enforcement officers have visited the homes of other signers as well.
DeSantis created an elections police unit in 2022 to investigate so-called election crimes. By that August, he’d arrested 20 “elections criminals” for allegedly voting improperly in the 2020 election.
A majority of those arrested — some at gunpoint — were Black. Most had been formerly incarcerated and thought they were eligible to vote, since Floridians had overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure restoring their voting rights. But DeSantis and his GOP allies in the state legislature used every........