“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
Republicans pulled out a win on Tuesday in Virginia, and they came close in a shocker in New Jersey. But for years, controversies surrounding election fraud allegations have left voters wondering if the elections were really accurate. Or maybe the count was accurate… and it included the ballots of every illegal alien, duplicate voter, out-of-state voter, and resident of every cemetery and graveyard within a 50-mile radius.
Now, one of the Republican Party’s rising stars is stepping up — and he’s threatening to send election cheats to jail.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a plan on Wednesday to form a state-level security force to prosecute violations of election law, like casting illegal ballots to sway elections.
“We are going to create a separate office at the state level solely dedicated to investigating and prosecuting election crimes in the state of Florida. We’ll [have] sworn law enforcement officers as part of this, we’ll have investigators, we’ll have the statewide prosecutor that’s able to bring the cases,” DeSantis revealed at a press conference in West Palm Beach on Wednesday.
Gov. DeSantis announced the formation of the Office of Election Crimes and Security, and it’s a game-changer.
Unlike other Republicans, this isn’t just idle talk; DeSantis is putting real muscle into the effort to stop would-be frauds and scammers. The new office will have 52 employees—20 of them law enforcement officers—and it will have five offices around the state, not including its main office in the state capital of Tallahassee.
The bill makes it a third-degree felony to engage in ballot harvesting—where political operatives gather as many absentee ballots as possible and turn them in at once, a practice that’s ripe for fraud.
Another one of the ways he’s cracking down on voter fraud is by requiring the state’s voting boards to be faster about removing people who are no longer eligible to vote. If someone has died, moved out of state, or been convicted of a felony, boards have to take his name off the voting rolls within 100 days.
From now on, anyone who tampers with Florida’s elections is going to regret it—for five to ten.
“I guarantee you this: The first person that gets caught, no one is going to want to do it again after that,” he said.
He’s also getting rid of “unsecure, haphazard” ballot drop boxes. “I don’t even think we should have drop boxes,” he said.
“It’s going to make Florida way number one by a long shot anywhere in the county” when it comes to honest elections, DeSantis said.
The Associated Press slammed DeSantis for making his claims “without evidence” — but some state officials say illegal voting and other election shenanigans they deal with every single election are very real.
Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley told Politico that he reports voting or election fraud cases to state authorities that are “well-documented,” but “not much ever happens.” That’s all going to change.
Part of the problem, the governor says, is that it wasn’t any specific person’s job to deal with these crimes, at least until now. “Some of these counties, some of them will do the cases but that’s not their expertise. They got all these other crimes that they have to deal with,” DeSantis told voters this week. “So by the time it happens, the election’s already over.”
“If someone’s ballot harvesting, you report it to these people and this is their sole job” from now on, DeSantis said.
Democrats oppose election integrity bills, for some reason, and say this announcement solves a problem that doesn’t exist. And DeSantis has already taken measures to secure the electoral process, which hadn’t been fixed before he took office.
The Heritage Foundation, which tracks documented and proven cases of election fraud, found the last five cases of voter fraud happened in 2018—before DeSantis took office.
“Our database includes only proven instances of voter fraud, not allegations of election fraud, of which there are many,” said John Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation. “In our view, the integrity of our elections and the current vulnerabilities in the system are too important to ignore. Accordingly, The Heritage Foundation will keep looking and pressing on this important issue.”
So will Ron DeSantis… and if Republicans are smart, they’ll follow his lead. Otherwise, they’ll be stuck on the sidelines as Democrats loosen up election laws on their way to turning America into a socialist country.
Frank Holmes is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”