Voting Rights ‘Under Siege,’ Judge Says in Tossing Parts of Florida Law

(Bloomberg Government) -- The right to vote, and the federal Voting Rights Act, are “under siege,” a federal judge said Thursday in throwing out parts of a Florida voting law passed in the wake of the 2020 election.

The state now must get the court's permission before enacting new laws on absentee ballot drop boxes, third-party voter registration groups, or “line warming” activities for the next decade, Chief Judge Mark Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida wrote in his order.

Florida lawmakers enacted some provisions of a 2021 law “with the intent to discriminate against Black voters,” Walker wrote.

“Without preclearance, Florida could continue to enact such laws, replacing them every legislative session if courts view them with skepticism,” he said. “Such a scheme makes a mockery of the rule of law.”

Appeal Anticipated

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) called Walker's ruling “performative partisanship” and told reporters “it's not going to be able to withstand appellate scrutiny.”

Imposing federal preclearance over state election laws was an “egregious abuse of his power,” Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls (R) said in an email.

The law (S.B. 90) required ballot drop boxes to be monitored in person, and unavailable during the hours when early-voting polling places are closed. Walker described lawmakers as justifying the changes with “conflicting and nonsensical rationales” and no evidence supporting claims that voter fraud was “even a marginal issue in Florida elections.”

While debating the legislation, Republican lawmakers discussed the potential for voter fraud. The National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Republican National Committee had pointed out the arrest of residents of The Villages, in central Florida, for trying to cast ballots in two states.

More than 11 million votes were cast in the state in the state in the 2020 general electon, and DeSantis initially had praised Florida for conducting a safe and secure election amid a pandemic.

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Democrats who hold state attorney general offices in 17 states supported the challenges to Florida's law. Their own election experiences undermine Florida's claims of voter fraud and low voter confidence, and the scale of voter fraud is “vanishingly small,” they said in an amicus brief.

Attorneys for the state of Florida argued in a post-trial brief that nothing in the new law justifies challenges to Florida's “prerogative to set the time, place, and manner of its elections.”

“In 2020, Florida had a safe and secure election, with high voter turnout and timely results, during a global pandemic. It was not, however, a perfect election,” they wrote. “There is no such thing as a perfect election.”

The state's elections supervisors opposed the legislation, saying it made requesting and returning vote-by-mail ballots more difficult in a crucial battleground state where casting ballots by mail has broad support.

Walker upheld portions of the law requiring voters to submit additional identification when returning ballots by mail. While evidence showed the law intended to discriminate against Black voters, the plaintiffs didn't show lawmakers intended to discriminate against Latino voters, he said.

Targeting Blacks

State history, particularly over the last 20 years, shows a pattern of Florida lawmakers “targeting Black voters because of their affiliation with the Democratic party,” the judge wrote, adding that suppressing just 1% of Black voters “could easily swing an election.”

The now-stricken restrictions on drop boxes, interactions with voters standing in line to cast their ballots, and third-party voter registration groups would have “a disparate impact on Black voters in some way,” according to the court order.

See also: Biden's Limited Voting To-Do List Unfinished as Primaries Near

Walker's ruling confirmed the law was “a discriminatory voter suppression bill,” Florida Democratic Party Chair Manny Diaz said in an emailed statement.

The judge consolidated four lawsuits that challenged the law based on its impact on the state's youngest voters, senior voters, disabled voters, and minority voters.

The civil rights and voting rights groups asking the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida to overturn the law include the League of Women Voters of Florida, Black Voters Matter Fund, Florida Alliance of Retired Americans, Florida NAACP, Common Cause, and Disability Rights Florida.

“We applaud the decision of the court to strike down forced speech provisions, enshrine voting rights and to establish protections for voting rights in Florida under pre-clearance,” said Caren Short, interim deputy legal director for voting rights with Southern Poverty Law Center.

The consolidated case is League of Women Voters v. Lee, N.D. Fla., No. 4:21-cv-00186, 3/31/22.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jennifer Kay in Miami at jkay@bloomberglaw.com

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Katherine Rizzo at krizzo@bgov.com; Bernie Kohn at bkohn@bloomberglaw.com

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