Sunshine Sentinel

A Florida Senate committee recently cleared legislation, Senate Bill 524, that would create an office to investigate election crimes, a development Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative and former Virginia attorney general, calls “very encouraging.”

“Here is bipartisan support [among ordinary Americans and Floridians] for prosecuting actual wrongdoing,” Cuccinelli told the Sunshine Sentinel in an email. “And it is very rare in any state to have the manpower dedicated to keeping elections clean, so the advance of SB 524 is very encouraging as we all work toward clean, transparent and secure elections.”

Cuccinelli describes himself as fighting "on the front lines of the conservative movement" for more than 20 years.

Another election law analyst, Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said not only should Florida create an elections crimes office, but that other states should follow suit.

“State legislators should make sure that a statewide prosecutor’s office has jurisdiction to prosecute all such election cases, especially when local prosecutors fail to act,” von Spakovsky wrote after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed the idea in his budget address in late January.  

He noted that the mainstream media criticized the proposal after DeSantis, a Republican, introduced it.

“The Washington Post painted the governor’s initiative as heavily partisan and a waste of money, citing individuals who claimed that the proposed office would be equivalent to an ‘elections SWAT team,’ as if that would be a bad idea,” von Spakovsky wrote.

“But the problem, as I told the reporter, is that too many prosecutors and local police ignore such crimes when they occur and don’t prosecute them," he added. "The reporter didn’t have to take my word for that. I referred her to a report directly on point that was released in November by the Public Interest Legal Foundation on whose board I serve.”

There were few reports of voting irregularities during the 2020 election in Florida, considered one of the top states in the nation for election security.

The legislation creating the 15-person Office of Election Crimes and Security contains other election reform provisions as well. These include requiring voter roll maintenance every year rather than every two years, requiring voters, beginning Jan. 1, 2024, to include the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, or a voter ID number, on vote-by-mail certificates, increasing the penalty for possessing more than two ballots, other than those of a family member, from a misdemeanor to a third-degree felony.

The election reforms in SB 524 follow changes to the state’s election code signed by DeSantis last May. These ban ballot harvesting (third party collection of mail ballots) and ban election officials from taking private money to fund the administration of elections.

Cuccinelli said reforms to the law “have gone a long way toward repairing the trust of millions of disenfranchised American voters who question our system of elections and whether showing up at the polls can even make a difference. But much more work remains to be done to protect the right to vote in Florida. We urge the legislature to continue lighting the way on these important issues, critical not just in Florida, but to all Americans seeking renewed faith in a democratic process they can believe in.”

Many of the moves in Republican-led state legislatures to revisit voting laws followed former President Donald Trump's unfounded claims that he lost the 2020 election due to massive voter fraud.