Vox hits DeSantis, suggests there should be no scrutiny of elections
May 3, 2022
Vox is most unhappy that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has created a new elections police to deal with complaints about electoral malpractice. The base claim is that because Jim Crow existed then there should be no scrutiny of elections at all – or at least that would be an unkind reading of their piece.
Jim Crow did exist, sure it did, Jim Crow was terrible and we’re all glad it’s gone. But an electoral police isn’t the same thing, not at all. The claim is: “Florida’s new election police unit is the scariest voter suppression effort yet.
“DeSantis’s law will sniff out problems that don’t exist.”
We could make that claim about any new arm of government or bureaucracy. We could identify people who would make that claim as well although we’d more generally not include Vox among them – they seem to be in favor of more government often enough.
Leaving such snark aside a large part of the Vox piece is about how electoral practice has become much looser in recent years. More absentee voting, more mail-in ballots. A definite expansion of voting rights. The argument against this new examination of voting is that historically there have been few to no problems with voting.
Yet the rules about voting have just been greatly relaxed – the very reason why we might want to have tighter checks on them.
Vox describes itself as “explaining the news” and it would be a good thing if it did. It gains some 24 million visits a month and is in the top 100 of U.S. news and media sites. We can’t help thinking that a proper explanation would be a little less partisan.