Like many of his GOP fellow-travelers, DeSantis has long indulged his autocratic impulses, from fighting court battles against tyrannical masks/ vaccines to pushing a gonzo bill to prohibit schools from making white people feel “discomfort” to passing multiple laws making it harder for people – oddly, mostly brown and black – to vote. In a state where over 40% of the populace vote by mail, the laws restrict absentee ballot-drop boxes, toughen ID rules for mail-in ballots, and forbid giving water to voters in long lines to, you know, keep them free. Democracy as wingnut reality show: DeSantis even made news of his signing the laws – now facing a court challenge – a Fox News exclusive. All this, in a state he touted in 2020 as the “gold standard” of election integrity after Trump won it, crowing, “The way Florida did it, I think, inspired confidence.” So will a new electoral SWAT team to fight imaginary crimes, he now argues, though of over 11 million votes cast in the last election, only 75 complaints got referred to law enforcement; they included three retired Village people arrested for zealously voting twice for Trump. Given un-cooperative reality, even the state’s GOP has “reacted tepidly” to the idea – “We’re going to look at it” – and Dems have written A.G Garland asking the DOJ to investigate voter suppression via “harmful proposals to create new partisan bodies.” Not just harmful, many note, but dumb. “This is a solution in search of a problem,” says a top prosecutor whose office has seen four referrals for election crimes over two decades and is “willing to bet a pretty penny staffers would sit around and wait for the phone to ring. That’s a lot of time watching Netflix and playing Candy Crush on the taxpayer dollar.” His brutal bottom line: “This is a $6 million door prize for a QAnon pep rally.”