Beware of what happens when underwhelmed election cops get bored

Generalissimo DeSantis wants his own police force. Fifty-two strong. Answerable to the non-elected minion the governor picked to be his secretary of state.

Ostensibly, the $5.7 million “Office of Election Crime and Security” will investigate election fraud. Except election fraud, outside the imagination of Donald Trump, hasn’t quite been a $5.7 million, 52-cop problem hereabouts.

After Trump carried Florida in 2020 (albeit, by a margin too slight to assuage his ego), Ron DeSantis himself tweeted, “Florida is a model for the rest of the nation to follow.” He told reporters, “The way Florida did it, I think, inspired confidence. I think that’s how elections should be run.”

But the governor spoke before the electoral outcome evolved into an all-consuming obsession for a presidential candidate who couldn’t fathom that 81,268,924 American voters preferred someone else. To appease the petulant loser, DeSantis concocted a solution, as the cliché goes, in search of a problem.

Obviously, the Office of Election and Security should be headquartered in The Villages, given that the sprawling, mostly Republican retirement community, 45 miles northwest of Orlando, has had a near monopoly on hinky voting lately. Of the five Floridians busted for fraud in the 2020 election, four reside in The Villages.

Unhappily for the Democrats-George Soros-Venezuela-antifa-AOC-and-theghost-of-Fidel-Castro-are-rigging-elections narrative at the heart of the governor’s new project, at least three of the suspects had cast (allegedly) illegal votes for Donald Trump. (The fifth transgressor was a former Republican state senator from Miami-Dade County accused of financing a sham candidate to confuse voters in a state Senate race.)

As things now stand, Florida will have 10 state investigators for every unresolved case. If the vote police worked out of The Villages, they could at least lend their operation an illusion of economy by buzzing around in electric golf carts tricked out with sirens, flashing blue lights and defibrillators to keep their aged suspects alive on the way to the pokey.

More likely, DeSantis’s under-employed team will keep busy by pursuing other issues that excite the Republican base. Florida knows this from experience. In the late 1950s, the infamous Johns Committee, headed up by a loathsome state senator named Charley Johns, was getting nowhere with its original mission to snuff out commies in the NAACP.

After regularly getting thumped in court by NAACP lawyers, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee decided to rationalize its inane existence by pursuing less formidable targets. The committee dispatched a cadre of ex-cops to state college campuses to hound suspected gays. It was a years-long exercise in homophobic excess, based on hearsay, cruelty and humiliation, unchecked by legal niceties like due process. Professors were fired. Students were expelled. Lives were ruined.

The Johns Committee is now considered one of the more shameful state-sanctioned endeavors in Florida history. Or rather it would be if Florida’s civic leadership had capacity for shame. Over the last few legislative sessions, Broward’s Rep. Evan Jenne and Sen. Lauren Book have been unable to get even a hearing on a resolution apologizing to Floridians “whose lives, well-being and livelihoods were damaged or destroyed” by the Johns Committee.

But Charley Johns’ mini-Gestapo gave us a chilling demonstration of what can happen when politicians create their own special constabulary to pursue imaginary transgressions. Sixty years later, the governor’s hussars, to rationalize their existence, will need to expand their specious portfolio. But no worries, this governor has plenty of divisive issues that need stirring. And lots of dissenters who need rousting.

If they had been around last week,

DeSantis could have sicced his henchmen on Dr. Raul Pino and generated some fabulous Fox News coverage. The Florida Department of Health, pretending the governor’s twisted notion of public health might have a scientific basis, removed Pino from his job as director of the health department’s Orange County operation. Dr. Pino’s great sin had to do with an email he sent to health department employees that bemoaned their inexplicably low vaccination rate. He called it “irresponsible.” In DeSantis World, that’s a blasphemy plenty worthy of jackboot intervention.

Those beleaguered University of Florida professors, whose expert testimony undermined Republican attempts to gerrymander political districts, might expect a visit.

Ron’s Rangers could add some muscle to the governor’s mandate against public health mandates. In their abundant spare time, his enforcers can round up public school teachers suspected of telling students that Florida’s racial history was less than hunkydory.

Come to think of it, 52 cops might not be enough. Not with so many doctors, teachers, professors, historians and county election supervisors in obvious need of Charley Johnsstyle enlightenment.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @grimm_fred.