How Ron DeSantis waged a targeted assault on Black voters: ‘I fear for what’s to come’

Al Lawson felt the weight of his victory the night he was elected to Congress in 2016.

He was born in Midway, a small town that's part of a stretch of land in northern Florida dotted with tobacco fields once home to plantations. A former basketball star, he was once reprimanded for drinking out of a whites-only water fountain. In some of his early campaigns for the state legislature, he ran into the Ku Klux Klan.

There was jubilation when he was elected.

"Everywhere I would go, it was like a celebration," Lawson said one morning last month in his office in downtown Tallahassee. "People saying: 'Boy, I wish my daddy, my granddaddy - I really wish they could see this.'"

In Congress, Lawson was a low-key member known for delivering federal money for things like new storm shelters to help his northern Florida communities. He was easily re-elected to the House in 2018 and 2020. But when he ran for re-election in 2022, he lost to a white Republican by nearly 20 points.

Lawson's loss was nearly entirely attributable to Governor Ron DeSantis. The governor went out of his way to redraw the boundaries of Lawson's district to ensure that a Republican could win it. It was a brazen scheme to weaken the political power of Black voters and a striking example of how DeSantis has waged one of the most aggressive - and successful - efforts to curtail voting rights in Florida.

In addition to reducing Black representation in Congress, the governor has tightened election rules, created a first-of-its-kind state agency, funded by more than $1m to prosecute election fraud and gutted one of the biggest expansions of modern-era voting rights.

"Governor DeSantis has really targeted Black folks in his efforts to strip, restrict and suppress our vote in the state of Florida. That has been his number one mission," said Jasmine Burney-Clark, the founder of Equal Ground, a nonprofit that works to register voters.

As DeSantis prepares to launch a run for president, his war on voting rights is a dangerous omen for what he could do in the White House. Several states have already passed similar voting restrictions and implemented their own units dedicated to prosecuting election fraud, which is extremely rare. DeSantis' office did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

"At the end of the day, this is all about his blind political ambition," said Angie Nixon, a Democratic state lawmaker who led a sit-in on the floor of the state legislature in protest of DeSantis's attack on voting rights. "I fear for what's to come."

Lawson's election was a big deal in Gadsden county, the only majority-Black county in Florida. Near the stately old courthouse in Quincy, the county seat, Brenda Holt, a county commissioner, can quickly point out the tree that was used to lynch Black people.

"We needed a Black congressman. We needed one simply because he would come to all these little places and help us with things. He understood about raising hogs and he understood about being out there in the tobacco fields," said Holt, who has also served as the chair of the county Democratic party. "When he walked in the room, you didn't have to say nothing. We didn't have to explain ourselves so much to him. Because he lived it."

Lawson's election was no accident. In 2015, the Florida supreme court ordered the state to draw a district that stretched across northern Florida, from Tallahassee to Jacksonville. Such a district was legally required, the court said, to preserve the ability of Black voters in that part of the state to elect the candidate of their choosing.

When it came time to redraw Florida's congressional districts last year, the Republican-controlled legislature offered up a plan that kept Lawson's district intact for at least another decade.

Then DeSantis stepped in.

On Martin Luther King weekend last year, the governor submitted his own proposal for Florida's 28 congressional districts. His plan chopped Lawson's district into four different ones, all of which favored Republicans. DeSantis took issue specifically with the idea that the state was required to draw an irregularly shaped district to benefit Black voters. Such an approach, he said, was unconstitutional.

The legislature did not back down. It passed a map that kept Lawson's district in place. But it also passed a backup map which broke up the majority of Lawson's district, but kept Jacksonville contained in one congressional district. It was a compromise.

DeSantis rejected that plan too, saying it was dead on arrival.

Eventually, the legislature caved and invited DeSantis to draw a congressional map.

"I served in the legislature for 17 years and never in the history of the legislative body have we turned over the redistricting to the governor. Never heard of that - never," said Tony Hill, a former Lawson staffer who unsuccessfully ran for Congress last year.

Lawson was blindsided. Some top Republicans in the state, he said, including Senator Rick Scott and Ted Yoho, privately told him they were surprised by what DeSantis was doing.

DeSantis, who had already been working with top Republican mapmakers, proposed a plan that sliced up Lawson's district and heavily favored Republicans in 20 of Florida's 28 congressional seats, a bump up from the 16 GOP seats that the legislature proposed. DeSantis's map also cut the number of districts in which Black voters had a chance to elect a candidate of their choice from four to two.

The legislature passed his map. Last November, white Republicans won all four seats in northern Florida.

"This is a lynching," Holt said. "You're treating us like a dog. They treat dogs better than us. We're pissed off."

It's now harder for Jacksonville residents to access federal resources to address issues like housing affordability, food deserts and crime. Several residents said they have not yet seen any town halls or events from Aaron Bean, the new GOP congressman who represents the area. A Bean spokesperson did not say whether he had held any events in Jacksonville. "Congressman Bean has been enthusiastic about seeing all corners of this newly drawn congressional district. From town halls to chamber of commerce events, from groups of thousands to groups of one, he has made it his mission to engage with as many residents of north-east Florida as possible," she said.

Ben Frazier, an activist who leads a nonprofit called the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, emphasized the need for federal assistance as he drove around the city's 33209 zip code - one of the most dangerous in the city - pointing out boarded-up businesses and houses.

"It is unfortunate that [DeSantis] has chosen to operate like that because he's not only a danger to Black people and people of color," he said. "He's a danger to democracy."

"It's people of color that all of this redistricting is concerned about," said Lee Harris, the senior pastor at Mt Olive Primitive Baptist church in Jacksonville. "If you notice, as long as they think they have control and the majority, they will push whatever law is beneficial to them."

DeSantis's attack on Black representation appears to have aims far outside Lawson's district.

The governor has waged a legal battle over a 2010 constitutional amendment, overwhelmingly approved by Florida voters, making it illegal to draw districts that reduce political access for racial minorities. Getting rid of Lawson's district would seem to violate that provision.

"It was a performing, crossover district where Black voters had long successfully elected their candidate of choice. And in dismantling it, it raises all kinds of indicia of discriminatory intent," said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.

If DeSantis succeeds in dismantling districts like Lawson's, it could ultimately provide legal cover for other states to do the same, Li said. In the federal courts, DeSantis's approach joins a long line of conservative cases that have been pushing to raise the bar for when race can be considered in redistricting.

"It's basically trying to divorce any consideration of race or racial impacts in a redistricting map from the actual drawing and construction of a redistricting map," said Chris Shenton, an attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who is challenging the Florida maps.

"That's a distinction that only makes sense on paper and only makes sense if what you're trying to do is prevent the Voting Rights Act from working."

Beyond redistricting, one of the key elements of DeSantis's crackdown on voting has been his use of a law enforcement unit to pursue charges of voter fraud.

One morning last August, Ronald Lee Miller, a Miami man in his late 50s, heard a knock on his door and answered, still in his underwear. When he opened the door, he saw that police had surrounded his home, some with their guns drawn and pointed at him. They put him in handcuffs and told him he was under arrest.

A few hours later, DeSantis appeared at a press conference in a Fort Lauderdale courtroom, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers, and announced Miller was among 19 people with prior criminal convictions being arrested for voter fraud and would "pay the price". They were charged with multiple counts of third-degree felonies, each punishable by up to five years in prison. The arrests were the first made under the office of election crimes and security, a new $1.2m office DeSantis had created a few months earlier.

Many saw it as a thinly veiled effort to keep Black people from voting (14 of those arrested were Black). And records showed that many of those charged believed they were eligible to vote. Even though they all had prior convictions that resulted in a lifetime voting ban in Florida, none of them had been warned they couldn't vote. All of them, including Miller, had received voter registration cards before casting a ballot.

Ahead of the arrests, DeSantis and Florida Republicans had also made the rules for voting with a felony conviction in Florida extremely confusing.

In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved one of the largest expansions of the right to vote in the modern era. They approved a constitutional amendment that allowed people with most felony convictions to vote. Those convicted of murder and sex-related offenses - as the 19 people in the arrests had been - were excluded.

DeSantis and the GOP legislature followed up by passing a law that required people with felony convictions to pay off outstanding fines and fees before casting a ballot. But Florida has no central mechanism for people to check how much they owe and state officials quickly became backlogged.

"They want to put fear, the same type of spirit, fear into people so that you won't vote," said Rosemary McCoy, a Jacksonville activist who had her voting rights restored in 2019.

Miller and his lawyer, Robert Farrar, eventually got his case dismissed on procedural grounds, successfully arguing that the statewide prosecutor didn't have the authority to bring the case.

But DeSantis did not let it go. In February, the legislature passed a law that expanded the power of the statewide prosecutor, bolstering their authority to go after cases like Miller's. DeSantis has also requested increasing the office of election crimes and security's budget to $3.15m and nearly doubling the number of personnel.

Now the governor and the legislature could cause more confusion. An election bill unveiled last week would make it so that all voters receive a warning that they may not be eligible to vote when they receive their official voter registration card.

"This has all become nothing more than political theater. It's a waste of time, waste of money, waste of judicial assets," Farrar said.

The office of election crimes and security also targets groups that register voters.

In Florida, Black and Hispanic voters are five times more likely than white voters in Florida to register through a third-party group. But in its first year, the office of election crimes and security levied $41,600 in fines against these voter registration groups. Those fines came after DeSantis and the legislature passed sweeping new voting restrictions and raised the maximum fine that could be levied from $1,000 to $50,000.

Burney-Clark said her nonprofit Equal Ground registered 10,000 voters in the lead-up to the 2020 election. But since then, it has scaled back and only registered a handful of voters - the group can't afford the risk of high fines.

Cecile Scoon, president of the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters, sees a clear through-line in all of DeSantis's efforts to attack voting rights.

"It's all connected to 'we don't care what you vote,'" she said. "'We don't care what you say. We know better and we're going to silence you.'

"We are not in the land of the free any more in the state of Florida."