Ballot harvesting ‘is now a third-degree felony,’ DeSantis said.
During a packed April 25 press conference in Spring Hill, Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 524 into law, strengthening voting rules in the state and establishing the nation’s first Office of Election Crimes and Security at the Department of State, specifically formed to investigate and prosecute voter fraud.
While most legacy media news reports insist claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election are “unsubstantiated,” “false,” “baseless,” “unfounded,” or outright lies that have been “debunked,” other reports are surfacing with evidence of widespread fraud through ballot harvesting, the process of third-party volunteers collecting ballots and delivering them to local election offices or ballot drop boxes.
In an interview with The New York Post, Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, said much of the ballot harvesting operation in the 2020 election was funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s “carefully orchestrated” $400 million-plus campaign to “convert official government election offices into get-out-the-vote operations for one political party and to insert political operatives into election offices in order to influence and manipulate the outcome of the election.”
And in the new documentary film 2000 Mules, premiering May 2 and May 4 in select theaters, author and director Dinesh D’Souza presents video evidence of a coordinated effort to harvest ballots and manipulate election results in key swing states during the 2020 election.
On May 6, 2021, DeSantis signed into law Senate Bill 90 (pdf), which strengthened voter ID rules, prohibited the mass mailing of unsolicited ballots, banned ballot harvesting, and prohibited the use of private donations—dubbed by DeSantis as “Zuckerbucks”—from being used to administer elections in the state.
While SB90 effectively banned ballot harvesting in the state of Florida, DeSantis said there was still concern that the penalties were not “severe enough,” and that a misdemeanor wasn’t a sufficient deterrent.
“In this bill we actually increase penalties for ballot harvesting,” he said on April 25, noting that “if you ballot harvest in the state of Florida, this is now a third-degree felony that you can be hit with.”
The measure the governor signed into law April 25 strengthens voter ID rules for mail-in ballots, requires the Department of State to develop more secure vote-by-mail ballot envelopes, and requires supervisors of election offices to clean their voter rolls every year.
The law also broadens the prohibition of “Zuckerbucks.” DeSantis said some elections offices were still “taking Zuckerbucks for legal expenses.” With the new law, DeSantis said “there’s not going to be any way, any nook and cranny, you are not getting Zuckerbucks.”
