At a campaign stop in Iowa, Ron DeSantis said he planned on using ballot harvesting—the tactic at the center of a debunked 2020 election conspiracy theory—in his own campaign. “We’re gonna do ballot harvesting,” DeSantis told a voter in Iowa, in a video posted by Washington Post reporter Dylan Well. “I’m doing it, yes.”
Ballot harvesting—a term that refers to delivering a completed absentee ballot on behalf of someone else—is legal in some states but banned or restricted in others. The practice was the subject of debunked right-wing conspiracy theories in 2020, with election deniers alleging that Democrats illegally paid “mules” to collect ballots in swing states. DeSantis, who has long dodged taking a stance on 2020 election conspiracy theories, framed embracing the practice as a way to get even. “I’m not gonna play with one hand tied behind my back,” he said.
This is terrible. DeSantis should step down immediately.
When informed on Thursday that Ron DeSantis has said that he plans on using ballot harvesting in his 2024 campaign, President Biden told reporters: “I wish Ron the best of luck, but stealing an election is not just about ballot harvesting, it’s about hiring a huge, capable team that’s in charge of filling out fake ballots with fake names, or the names of Disney characters, or the names of deceased individuals, or the names of people who’ve already voted in the election. It’s not as easy as it looks, but regardless, I wish Ron the best of luck.”
When informed that Mr. DeSantis’s had said that, “I’m not gonna play with one hand tied behind my back,” Mr. Biden told reporters: “Well apparently, Ron DeSantis is no Rush Limbaugh, because Rush always used to say, ‘I keep half my brain tied behind my back, as always, my friends, just to make things fair here — fair and sustainable, for the callers’.”
“I mean, if Rush was able to do his shows with half his BRAIN tied behind his back,” Biden said, “you would think Ron could at least run a campaign with one HAND tied behind his back. I mean, let’s face it, there’s a big difference between a hand and a brain! Right?”
Who wrote this article? Ballot harvesting has as much to do with debunked 2020 election conspiracy theory as voting does. Legal or otherwise, ballot harvesting increases voter turnout to artificially high levels. People who are uninvolved and would normally not vote, because they are not at all engaged in the voting process, cast ballots for whomever asks them to vote. In other words whoever does the ‘harvesting’ influences the outcome of the elections disproportionately. Imagine an old-age home or school or a poor building project with dozens of people with no opinion of who to vote for . If a democrat goes around asking all the residents to vote for his guy then the Dems just got a few hundred additional votes that they don’t deserve, unless the republicans do the same thing.
Get a load of this article writer slipping in “debunked.” Debunked my foot. The election was stolen, DeSantis ( 14%) should be forced to clearly answer if he believes that election was fair.