Friday's New York Times hit every typical liberal note as Florida passed a voting-integrity law. Reporters Patricia Mazzei and Nick Corasaniti collected every cliche under the cliched headline:
Florida Republicans Pass Voting Limits in Broad Elections Bill
The bill, which Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign, is the latest Republican effort to restrict voting after the 2020 election
Republicans always want to "limit" and "restrict" voting. And they're racist, facing "arguments by Democrats and voting rights experts that some of the new measures would disproportionately affect voters of color."
Notice how Democrats and nonpartisan "experts" always seem to go together. That's because the "nonpartisans" are leftists that aren't identified that way:
“There was no problem in Florida,” said Kara Gross, the legislative director and senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Everything worked as it should. The only reason they’re doing this is to make it harder to vote.”
Democrats and "civil rights groups" also go together nicely, as a "coalition of Democrats and civil rights groups filed a federal lawsuit challenging its legality."
The bill was based on cuckoo conspiracy theories of a Trump landslide, of course: "G.O.P. lawmakers have been fueled by a party base that has largely embraced Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen 2020 election." Check that box.
Left out of the story is any mention of the vast majority of voters who favor "restrictions" like asking for an ID at the polls.
Sadly, corporations weren't pressured into trying to cancel everything:
Once the bill is signed into law, Florida will become the first state to create new barriers to voting after businesses across the country embarked on a public pressure campaign to oppose such measures. Major corporations, after speaking out against voting bills in states like Georgia and Texas, remained largely muted on the Republican push in Florida.
Republicans were eventually quoted late in the story, with the warning they "echoed language used by Mr. Trump." They did find a Republican voting official to call the bill a "travesty."
But the colorful ending to the story was provided by a Democrat:
One Democratic representative, Fentrice Driskell of Tampa, framed the debate as similar to the hunt for the chupacabra, the mythical, nightmarish mammal-gobbling and goat-blood-sucking beast.
“Members, I’ve got no evidence for you on the chupacabra, and I got no evidence for you about ballot harvesting,” Ms. Driskell said. “But what I can tell you is this: that our system worked well in 2020, by all accounts, and everyone agreed. And that for so many reasons, we don’t need this bad bill.”
