Governor Ron DeSantis has made voting simpler in sure Florida counties battered by Hurricane Ian – however solely Republican-leaning ones.
DeSantis signed an govt order on Thursday that eases voting rules for about 1 million voters in Lee, Charlotte and Sarasota counties, all areas that Hurricane Ian hit arduous and that each one reliably vote Republican.
Meanwhile, Orange county, a Democratic-leaning space which skilled historic flooding from the storm, obtained no voting exceptions, reported the Washington Post.
The lodging include prolonged early voting days and the power for voters to ship mail-in ballots from addresses not listed in voting data.
Voting rights teams had beforehand requested the governor to increase the statewide voting registration deadline, which ended on Tuesday, and so as to add extra early voting days, as properly as implement different lodging.
DeSantis complied – however just for the three Republican counties.
“Tens of thousands of Floridians have been displaced, and today’s executive order fails to meet the moment and ensure voting access for all Florida voters,” mentioned Jasmine Burney-Clark, founding father of voter rights group Equal Ground, in an announcement. “Instead, Governor DeSantis is politicizing a natural disaster.”
In the emergency order, DeSantis mentioned the choice to solely accommodate three counties was based mostly on “based on the collective feedback of the Supervisors of Elections across the state and at the written requests of the Supervisors of Elections in Charlotte, Lee, and Sarasota counties”, the Post reported.
But Burney-Clark mentioned that the choice to exclude different counties “will remain yet another example of Governor DeSantis disenfranchising voters”.
The governor had beforehand declined to make changes in voting legal guidelines throughout different statewide emergences, together with firstly of the Covid-19 pandemic, regardless of requests from native election officers.
DeSantis and Florida Republicans have additionally enacted a lot of legal guidelines that limit voting in the previous two years, together with one measure that bans anybody serving to drop off mail-in ballots from having greater than two ballots that don’t belong to them.