THE WEEKLY REVEAL
Saturday, March 11, 2023
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Hello! In this issue:
- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis revamps his campaign to prosecute voters.
- What can happen when police don’t believe a sexual assault report.
- Our connection to the Department of Justice’s investigation of Louisville police.
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NEW
DeSantis’ Election Police Have Largely Flopped in Florida Voter Prosecutions. A New Law Aims to Change That.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during an August 2022 press conference at which he announced 20 prosecutions for illegal voting. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis promised to crack down on voter fraud, a made-up problem that endless studies, court rulings and bipartisan reports have found no evidence of anywhere in the country.
Last year, DeSantis signed a law that created an entirely new law enforcement agency to police elections, the Office of Election Crimes and Security. The office’s first round of cases charged people with alleged voter fraud. They’ve largely flopped, resulting in dropped charges, a number of dismissals, one plea agreement that resulted in no punishment and only one partial conviction.
Now a new Florida law gives DeSantis’ prosecutors power to pursue more election-related cases – a move explicitly designed to get around the judicial scrutiny of the state’s unsuccessful first cases.
Matletha Bennette, a senior staff attorney for voting rights at the Southern Poverty Law Center who is based in Tallahassee, Florida, said Republican politicians try to change voting laws “when results don’t match their expectations” and “the Legislature is now changing the rules of the game.”
The Post-2020 Push to Crack Down on Voting
Last year, we revealed that the proliferation of election crime legislation in state legislatures nationwide represented the most intense voter suppression threat in decades and came in direct response to false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Our new analysis shows that push has only intensified in the four months since the 2022 midterms: Lawmakers in 20 states already have introduced at least 57 bills targeting election activity.
And while it was former President Donald Trump that took the voter fraud myth and made it a central platform of the Republican Party, it’s DeSantis, a likely primary challenger in the 2024 presidential race, who has taken the idea and turned it into a law enforcement policy in the state with the third-most electoral votes in the nation.
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DIG DEEPER
For over a year, Reveal’s democracy team has been tracking state laws across the country that would dramatically criminalize voting activity. If you’ve missed any of the team’s previous reporting, take a moment to dig deeper via their stories, radio show and podcast, and a first-of-its-kind database.
📝 Texas Republicans Look to Usurp Power of Local Prosecutors Who Don’t Pursue Their Voter Fraud Agenda. Read.
📝 Big Lie Proponents Are Creating Harsh Criminal Penalties for Elections Activity. Read.
🎧 The Ballot Boogeymen. Listen.
🔎 Search for the Crime Bills That Target Voting and Elections in Your State. Explore.
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THIS WEEK’S PODCAST
From Victim to Suspect
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For several years, Reveal reporter Rachel de Leon has been looking at cases across the country in which people report sexual assaults to the police, only to find themselves investigated.
This week on Reveal, we explore the case of Nicole Chase, a young mom who took a job at a restaurant in Canton, Connecticut, to support her family. She liked the work and was good at her job. But she had been putting up with her boss’s alleged crude behavior, until one night she said he went too far.
She went to the local police – but that didn’t solve her problem. It created a new one, leading to multiple lawsuits, including one that would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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🎧 Other places to listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
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RELATED
De Leon’s investigation of how a victim can become a suspect in a sexual assault case is also the subject of a forthcoming Netflix documentary, “Victim/Suspect,” which premieres May 23. Hear more about the project from the film’s director, Nancy Schwartzman.
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INSIDE THE NEWSROOM
The Reveal Connection in the Department of Justice’s Investigation of Louisville Police
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After a botched police raid by the Louisville Metro Police Department in Kentucky led to the shooting death of Breonna Taylor in 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division launched a pattern-and-practice investigation of the department in April 2021.
The Department of Justice released its findings in a 90-page report on Wednesday, detailing seven main issues, including that Louisville police have a pattern of using excessive force, unlawfully executing search warrants without knocking and announcing, and unlawfully discriminating against Black people in their enforcement activities.
The Reveal Connection
The report also identified deficiencies in the Police Department’s response to and investigation of domestic violence and sexual assault. The Department of Justice saw instances “where LMPD (Louisville Metro Police Department) detectives presented potential sexual assault and domestic violence cases to prosecutors even though little to no investigation had been done, resulting in prosecutions being declined on scant investigative records. Even when prosecutors wrote to detectives indicating that more investigation was needed, detectives either closed these cases as ‘prosecution declined’ or let them sit open without any further investigation,” the report details.
Detectives marking cases as “prosecution declined” is a finding that matches a Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting story, which used our data from a 2018 investigation into how police across the country make it seem like they’re solving more rape cases than they actually are.
KyCIR found that Louisville Metro Police Department officers sometimes brought rape cases to prosecutors to decide whether to make an arrest before they’d done much investigating. If prosecutors declined the case, the police could act like they’d dealt with it through a bookkeeping trick. They could say it was cleared “by exception.” And at the time, Louisville had the sixth-highest rate in the nation of clearing rape cases by exception, rather than by how you might expect a case to actually be cleared – by arrest.
Listen to season one of the Dig podcast to hear a full season about how Louisville rigs its rape stats.
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SUPPORT ACCESS TO PUBLIC INFORMATION
Sunshine Week (March 12-18) and National Freedom of Information Day (March 16) are coming up. Both days highlight the central role transparency plays in our democracy and how journalism is critical to ensuring government transparency and accountability.
At Reveal, we invest our resources to support our reporters with the legal firepower necessary to obtain records and information in the public interest. Supercharge our efforts by becoming a member today. No contribution is too small. Donate today!
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This issue of The Weekly Reveal was written by Kassie Navarro, edited by Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick. If you enjoyed this issue, forward it to a friend. Have some thoughts? Drop us a line with feedback or ideas!
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