Vote-by-mail in Florida is now a nightmare. Thanks, Donald Trump. Thanks, Ron DeSantis

So, here was Greg Gutfeld on Fox News this week:

“It seems when everything in the game doesn’t go the way Dems want it to go, they’ll prefer to change the game, rather than trying to figure out how to win,” he said. “That happens with a lot of things, including elections.”

He must not be talking about Florida.

If you voted by mail last year, the state of Florida unceremoniously canceled your pre-existing ballot request for the upcoming presidential election.

That’s right. Gone by decree. If you want to vote by mail again, you’ve got to start from scratch and contact the elections office.

Can’t blame the legislatively invisible Democrats in Florida for changing this “game” on mail-in voting rules. Why did this happen?

Well, this calls for a little history.

The history behind absentee voting in Florida

Before the turn of the century, Florida had what was called “absentee” voting. Voters hoping to be allowed to vote through the mail had to write to their county elections office to explain what sort of reason, such as a disability or out-of-state travel, made it impossible to vote in person for the upcoming election.

To cast an absentee ballot, the voter was also required to get the signature of an adult witness, who had to be a registered voter and was allowed to witness up to four more voters’ absentee ballots for that election.

Those were the rules when Jeb Bush became Florida’s governor.

Bush scrapped absentee voting, and under him and the Republican-led Legislature, Florida became one of 27 states that legalized no-excuse voting by mail.

“You can avoid the long lines and vote from the convenience of your home,” then-Gov. Bush said in a 2002 recorded message to voters.

Voting by mail wasn’t only a convenience to those taking advantage of it. The expansion of vote-by-mail made lines shorter on Election Day and allowed county elections officials to avoid tabulation slowdowns by calculating the mail-in vote days before the in-person vote was counted.

The state Republican Party embraced it by sending out color pamphlets to its registered voters along with pre-printed request cards for mail-in ballots. The witness requirement was scrapped, ballot drop boxes were established throughout the state, and the word “absentee” was stricken from the mail-in voting law.

It paid off for them. In Florida, registered Republican voters overwhelmingly outnumbered registered Democrats when it came to choosing to vote by mail.

Here are some recent numbers. In the general elections for the years 2014, 2016, and 2018, registered Republicans voting by mail outnumbered registered Democrats by a margin of more than 50,000 votes for each of those statewide elections.

More: Cerabino: Mail-in voting in Florida deserves a bi-partisan stamp of approval

To give you an idea of how significant this is, consider this:

In the 2014 governor’s race for Rick Scott and the 2018 governor’s race for Ron DeSantis, they both received vote margins from mail-in ballots that exceeded their overall margins of victory.

And in 2016, Donald Trump had a 58,244 mail-in-vote edge over Hillary Clinton in Florida, which was more than half his margin of victory in the state.

So, why are Republicans in Florida now trying to make it harder to vote by mail?

Three things happened during the past few years: Democrats promoted mail-in voting like never before, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and Trump, well, let’s just say he once again became his own worst enemy.

With people growing fearful of being in crowds because of the easily transmissible virus, the Democrats urged their voters to consider voting by mail. And being that they were less likely to consider the real health risks of COVID a “hoax,” they did.

Meanwhile, the Republicans, largely due to Trump’s outspoken stance, treated voting by mail — something they had formerly championed — as nothing more than wholesale voter fraud.

With the 2020 election months away, Trump was wildly tweeting that mail-in voting was going to steal his upcoming victory.

“RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS, IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” he Tweet-shouted a few months before the election.

When it was pointed out that he had voted by mail from his Mar-a-Lago address, Trump claimed incorrectly that he voted “absentee” — a distinction that doesn’t exist in Florida.

“Absentee Ballots are fine,” Trump tweeted. “A person has to go through a process to get and use them. Mail-In Voting, on the other hand, will lead to the most corrupt Election in USA history.”

More: Cerabino: Don't tell Trump, but in Florida, voting by mail was once considered 'phenomenal'

As a result of his outspoken willful ignorance, Trump was suppressing Republicans in Florida and elsewhere from using what had been a reliable way to bank votes for weeks before Election Day.

In Florida, registered Democrats suddenly outnumbered registered Republicans as mail-in voters. In 2020, more than 2.1 million registered Democrats in Florida voted by mail — outnumbering registered Republicans by more than 683,000 voters. And in 2022, the Dems did it again, this time beating Republicans by a margin of nearly 200,000 mailed votes.

The Republicans were wedded to misinformation and lies as Trump kept arguing after the election that fraudulent voting by mail had cost him the presidency.

“YOU CAN NEVER HAVE FAIR & FREE ELECTIONS WITH MAIL-IN BALLOTS — NEVER, NEVER, NEVER,” he shout-Tweeted last year.

In Florida, the sudden shift in the party affiliation of voters using mail-in voting made Republican lawmakers convinced that they had to erect impediments to what used to be their preferred method of voting.

In an email exchange between Republican lawmakers, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, Joe Gruters, wrote that it would be “devastating” to Republicans in Florida if lawmakers didn’t come up with a law to wipe out the existing vote-by-mail applications on file from millions of registered voters.

So, instead of vote-by-mail ballot requests being automatically fulfilled for four years, the new law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis as part of a Fox News televised event wiped out all ballot requests at the end of 2022 and limited new applications for mail-in ballots to be valid for two years instead of four.

Following Trump’s lead took another strange turn this year.

While Republican lawmakers were changing the voting rules to fall in line with Trump’s paranoia, he finally figured out that mail-in voting wasn’t so bad, after all.

While speaking to a gathering at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, Trump said it’s time for Republicans to embrace mail-in voting as a way to try “beating the Democrats at their own game.”

“We have to change our thinking, because some bad things happened,” he told the group. “That means swamping the left with mail-in votes, early votes and Election Day votes.”

Trump called for vote-by-mail ballot drop boxes being put in every church, and in a mailer to supporters, he announced a “ballot harvesting fund” to pay for people to pick up and deliver mail-in ballots to Republican voters in future elections.

And yes, this is the same person who shout-tweeted in April of 2020: “GET RID OF BALLOT HARVESTING, IT IS RAMPANT WITH FRAUD.”

So, who knows where the Trump-afflicted Republican Party will stand on mail-in voting by next year’s presidential election?

But it’s clear that Gutfeld’s observation about gaming elections was just half-right.

There does seem to be a political party trying to change the rules of the game when “everything in the game” doesn’t go their way, “rather than trying to figure out how to win.”

He just got the party wrong.

Frank Cerabino is a columnist at The Palm Beach Post, a part of the USA TODAY Florida Network.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Florida elections: Vote-by-mail trashed by Republicans, DeSantis, Trump