One of the most bizarre aspects of the 2020 election-denial drama is the search for voter fraud in states that voted for Trump. Florida is Exhibit Number One, as demonstrated in this excellent article in the New York Times by Alexandra Bersin and Sharon LaFraniere. Trump won Florida handily, yet Governor Ron DeSantis felt he had to mollify Trump’s rabid base by insisting that he would root out election fraud. Did he want to increase Trump’s numbers or what? Maybe Biden really won Florida? It made no sense. Or was DeSantis grandstanding for the nutty rightwing base?

The story begins:

It resembled a political rally more than a news conference. In November 2021, exactly one year after Donald J. Trump lost the presidential election to Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida spoke to a raucous crowd in a hotel conference room just a few miles from Mr. Trump’s home base of Mar-a-Lago.

Their suspicions about vast election malfeasance would be heard, Mr. DeSantis promised. He was setting up an election police unit and he invited the crowd to send in tips about illegal “ballot harvesting,” nodding to an unfounded theory about Democrats collecting ballots in bulk.

The crowd whooped and waved furiously. “He gets it!” posted a commenter watching on Rumble.

But in his seven-minute, tough-on-election-crimes sermon, Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, never explicitly endorsed that theory or the many others spread by the defeated president and embraced by much of their party.

In this way, for nearly three years, Mr. DeSantis played both sides of Republicans’ rift over the 2020 election. As his state became a buzzing hub of the election denial movement, he repeatedly took actions that placated those who believed Mr. Trump had won.

Most prominent was the creation of an election crimes unit that surfaced scores of “zany-burger” tips, according to its former leader, disrupted the lives of a few dozen Floridians, and, one year in, has not yet led to any charges of ballot harvesting or uncovered other mass fraud.

Yet Mr. DeSantis kept his own views vague. Only last month — two years, six months and 18 days after Mr. Biden was sworn into office — did Mr. DeSantis, now running for president, acknowledge that Mr. Biden had defeated Mr. Trump.

DeSantis never spoke honestly to the election deniers. Instead he appeased them. His “election crimes unit” managed to find a grand total of 32 ex-felons who voted illegally. They didn’t know they were voting illegally because they received letters from the state urging them to vote and were issued voter registration cards.

Nathan Hart, a 50-year-old ex-felon from near Tampa, is among 32 people who have been arrested or faced warrants under the new initiative. Mr. Hart, who plans to appeal his conviction, said he lost his job as a warehouse worker because he had to show up in court. When he cast his ballot for Mr. Trump he had no idea he was ineligible to vote, he said.

He and others suffered so that the governor “could have a really good photo op and make himself look tough,” he said.

In the 2020 election, 11 million Floridians voted, and Trump won the state by 371,686 votes. Yet the leaders of the election fraud crusade descended on Florida, including Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, Michael Flynn, and Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock.com. Local activists organized to find evidence of voter fraud. One group even delivered a box of claims to DeSantis’s mother, who sent it on to her son. None of the “evidence” or tips panned out. The search for voter fraud was a wild goose chase.

DeSantis’ much-ballyhooed election crimes unit turned over 1,500 names of potential fraudsters to local officials, which resulted in 32 arrests. A big nothing-burger.

DeSantis boasted about his crackdown on voter fraud, but never admitted that it produced no evidence of voter fraud. The only genuine fraud was the insistence by conspiracy theorists that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud.

And my initial question remains unanswered: what was the point of searching for voter fraud in a state that Trump won handily?