South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
DeSantis promotion of ‘Don’t tread on me’ specialty license plate design frustrates critics
Gov. Ron DeSantis is hoping that a potential Florida specialty license plate design sends a clear message to out-town drivers. “Don’t tread on me.” On July 30, DeSantis tweeted about a tag design in Florida baring the rattlesnake flag famously known as the Revolutionary War-era Gadsden flag.
The symbol has largely been invoked in the modern era to depict far-right extremist ideology and as a rallying cry for the “Stop the Steal” movement, which attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
DeSantis’ tweet stated the plate would benefit the Florida Veteran Foundation and “sends a clear message to out-of-state cars, “Don’t Tread on Me” or Florida.”
The plate, as well as the tweet, has garnered a large amount of negative reception from both Floridians and out-state critics.
“It doesn’t actually send any message. We’ve got one in Tennessee too. Ours is a fundraiser for a state park that interprets the Overmountain Men who gathered at Sycamore Shoals before the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780,” tweeted
Aaron Astor, a professor of Maryville College.
Similar plates are also already available Kansas, Missouri and Virginia, in some cases for years, as fundraising tools for various organizations, according to a report by NPR.
Florida introduced the plate design in 2019, prior to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol building, but Kansas approved its “Don’t Tread on Me” plate only weeks after Jan. 6, NPR reported. Missouri and Virginia had approved the plate a decade before.
Florida’s is still not available, but has been in probationary status since it was
passed by the 2020 Legislature, one of 31 new designs that only began accepting preorders in October 2020 with a two-year window to garner 3,000 presales lest they be taken off the books.
Only six of the 31 proposed tags have already met their preorder threshold including one for Walt Disney World.
Before DeSantis’ tweet, the Gadsden flag plate was among the least ordered, but has now shot up with nearly 1,800 orders total as of Aug.
1, with 1,200 to go before it can be put into production.
It, and other specialty tags still below that threshold, also got their two-year deadline extended after legislative action passed this year.
If it reaches the presale benchmark, it will then go into production and be available a few months after at the state’s 67 county tax collectors’ offices.
The state currently has
140 designs for specialty tags available for purchase, with an annual extra $25 added
to the registration fee that is distributed to each plate’s charitable organization.
Statewide as of Aug.
1, there were 1,948,764 specialty tags registered from among all the options.
The federal highway administration listed
18,464,506 vehicles registered in the state as of 2020, so about one out of every
10 cars in the state has a specialty tag.