THEY STAND SO LOW YOU GOT TO PICK 'EM UP:

In heavily Democratic Fort Lauderdale, the 5′9″ DeSantis -- the modern fulfillment of the Jimmy Breslin-ism about a small man in search of a balcony -- elevated himself on a podium, flanked as he so often is by armed and uniformed men and women of law enforcement, to highlight his crackdown on supposed voter fraud ahead of November's election.

"That is against the law, and now they're gonna pay the price for it," DeSantis declared of 20 Floridians -- almost all from Democratic strongholds such as Broward County, where his campaign-rally-style announcement was staged, or Miami-Dade -- accused of casting ballots despite a law barring them because they'd been convicted of murder or sexual assault.

But the event and its stench of "law and order" intimidation revealed so much more through what was left unsaid. Such as the fact that DeSantis' Office of Election Crimes and Security -- like so much that the Florida governor does, a dangerous escalation of the GOP's long-running war on voting rights into straight-up authoritarian territory -- has spent $3.9 million in taxpayer dollars to find alleged fraud in less than 0.0002% of the 11 million votes cast in the Sunshine State. The outlay is about $195,000 for each allegation.

But arguably more outrageous is the way that Team DeSantis is less exposing a systematic problem -- actual voting fraud in America is extremely rare -- but rather taking cynical advantage of several years of confusion in Florida over its laws regarding whether people convicted of crimes can vote. In 2018, the state's voters overwhelmingly passed a referendum allowing most felons who'd served their time to vote, only for GOP lawmakers to muddy the waters by imposing new requirements for restitution. It's now apparent there was widespread confusion -- not just among citizens, but from government officials -- over who could vote in 2020.

Indeed, Florida journalists who dug into the 20 criminal cases found a scenario rooted in benign confusion, not malicious fraud. In Orange County, Fla., the three people charged with third-degree felonies -- punishable up to five years in prison -- said they mistakenly believed their rights had been restored in the 2018 vote, and one man said he'd simply been sent a ballot in the mail and returned it. Nathan Hart, 49, told the Miami Herald he was renewing his driver's license when a man at a voter registration booth convinced him, mistakenly, he was eligible to vote. "One individual guy voting when he thought he could is hardly voter fraud," said Hart, now terrified of losing the life he'd rebuilt after his incarceration.

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