Now it’s fine to change voting rules. When it benefits them.
And here I thought that only the state legislature should have the power to do this sort of thing in an emergency:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used his emergency powers on Thursday to waive state election laws for counties hard hit by Hurricane Ian that are grappling with widespread damages and disruptions.
DeSantis agreed to set aside state election laws so elections officials in Charlotte, Lee and Sarasota — all of which are Republican strongholds — can consolidate polling places, expand early voting locations and make it easier to send mail-in ballots to voters to an address that is not listed in voting records.
During the pandemic, when people were dying daily by the thousands all over the country, state and local governments changed the rules to accommodate voters so they didn’t have to expose themselves to the deadly virus. We had no vaccine, we had no treatments. Any of us could have wound up on a ventilator or in the ground.
And Republicans, led by Donald Trump, said these accommodations were a form of cheating. Donald Trump and his henchmen like Bill Barr all claimed that the election was tainted by the use of drop boxes, drive up voting and mail in ballots. They asserted that executives and state courts had no authority to make these changes. They were liars, of course, but in the end they persuaded their gullible followers that Democrats stole the election through these accommodations.
Now that Ron DeSantis, an election denier, needs the votes of Republicans in the midst of an emergency, he has unilaterally made voting accommodations. How do we function as a nation with politicians this blatantly self serving?