“An Opportunity Lost To Register A Voter Is An Opportunity Gone Forever”: Federal Judge Blocks Florida Voter Suppression Law
A federal judge blocked much of Florida’s year-old voter suppression law today as an unconstitutional infringement on speech and voting rights.
Last year, the Republican-held Florida legislature passed HB 1355, which imposed harsh new restrictions on third-party voter registration groups, requiring them to turn in completed registration forms 48 hours — to the minute — after completion, or face fines. Outside groups often register hundreds of people at a time and, before this law, had used a quality-control process that took days to ensure the accuracy of submitted forms. With the onerous restrictions now in place, some groups like the League of Women Voters were ultimately forced to cease registration drives in the Sunshine State.
In blocking the new law, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle wrote:
The statute and rule impose a harsh and impractical 48-hour deadline for an organization to deliver applications to a voter registration office and effectively prohibit an organization from mailing applications in. And the statute and rule impose burdensome record-keeping and reporting requirements that serve little if any purpose, thus rendering them unconstitutional even to the extent they do not violate the NVRA. […]
The plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm if an injunction is not issued, first because the denial of a right of this magnitude under circumstances like these almost always inflicts irreparable harm, and second because when a plaintiff loses an opportunity to register a voter, the opportunity is gone forever.
Though state judges and the Department of Justice have already taken steps to prevent voter disenfranchisement, Hinkle’s decision is the first time a federal court has blocked one of the most recent round of state voter suppression laws.
Voters have already begun to experience the effects of new anti-voting laws. Minority voter registration is down significantly from the 2008 election. Among Latinos nationwide, voter registration has dropped five percent; for blacks, registration rates are down seven percent.
New York University’s Brennan Center, which studies voting rights issues, hailed the decision. “Florida’s law and others approved in the past year represent the most significant cutback in voting rights in decades,” said director Wendy Weiser. “Today’s decision will help turn the tide.”
By: Scott Keyes, Think Progress, May 31, 2012
“Here They Go Again”: How Florida Governor Rick Scott Could Steal The Election For Mitt Romney
On Wednesday, November 7, Mitt Romney could wake up as the President-elect thanks to one man: Florida Governor Rick Scott. With little fanfare, Scott is undertaking an audacious plan to kick thousands of Floridians off the ballot just before this year’s elections. It’s a sloppy, chaotic and possibly illegal plan. But it just might work. Here’s how:
1. Scott has created a massive list of Floridians to purge from the voting rolls before the election. Late last year, Governor Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” But Browning did not have access to reliable citizenship data. The state attempted to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing the voting file with data from the state motor vehicle administration, but the motor vehicle data does not contain updated citizenship information. The process, which created a list of 182,000 people, was considered so flawed by Browning that he refused to release the data to county election officials. Browning resigned in February and Scott has pressed forward with the purge, starting with about 2600 voters.
2. The list of “ineligible” voters is riddled with errors and includes hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens. According to data obtained by ThinkProgress, in Miami-Dade county alone, 1638 people were flagged by the state as “non-citizens.” Already, 359 people on the list have provided the county with proof of citizenship and 26 people were identified as U.S. citizens directly by the county. The remaining 1200 have simply not responded to the letter informing them of their purported ineligibility. Similar problems have been identified in Polk County and Broward County.
3. Scott’s list is heavily targeted at Democratic and Hispanic voters. A study by the Miami Herald found that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted in a state hunt to remove thousands of noncitizens from Florida’s voting rolls.” For example, Hispanics comprise 58 percent of the list but just 13 percent of eligible voters. Conversely, “Whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal.”
4. Florida election officials have acknowledged that, as a result of Scott’s voter purge, eligible voters will be removed from the rolls. “It will happen,” Mary Cooney, a spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, told ThinkProgress. On or about June 9, anyone who hasn’t responded to the ominous and legalistic letter informing them of their purported ineligibility will be removed from the rolls. Some eligible voters won’t have been able to respond by that time due to travel, work obligations, family obligations or confusion as to the purpose of the letter. Some will forget to open it. Others may have moved.
5. Florida will likely be a close contest in 2012 and purging eligible Democratic and Hispanic voters could tip the balance to Romney. In the latest Real Clear Politics average of polling in the state, Romney and Obama are separated by just 0.5 percent. Hundreds of eligible voters in Democratic strongholds, wrongfully purged from the rolls, could easily make the difference for Romney.
6. Winning Florida could clinch the election for Mitt Romney. Nationally, the race between Obama and Romney is within two points. It’s expected to be close all the way to election day and Florida’s 29 electorial votes would be the deciding factor in many plausable electorial scenarios.
Will history repeat itself in Florida this year? By one estimate, 7000 Florida voters were wrongfully removed from the voter rolls for the 2000 presidential election — 13 times George W. Bush’s margin of victory in that state after the U.S. Supreme Court halted the post-election recount.
By: Judd Legum, Think Progress, May 28, 2012
“An Unconstitutional Entitlement”: Rep Allen West Objects To Early Voting
Rep. Allen West (R-FL) took aim at early voting this week, criticizing its proliferation and suggesting that it may be unconstitutional.
In 2008, more than half of Floridians voted before Election Day, a process that former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush (R) called “wonderful.” Yet early voting has been under attack recently in Florida. Last year, the state legislature passed a voter suppression bill that slashed early voting in the state from two weeks to eight days, including cutting out the Sunday before the election, a day when many congregants in black churches would vote en masse. Worse, this appears to be part of a much larger effort to suppress the vote in Florida. Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL), for example, is currently engaged in a massive effort to remove as many as 180,000 people from the voting rolls.
ThinkProgress spoke with West about this rollback after a town hall meeting Tuesday. West was critical of “this early voting thing,” protesting that “people see it as an entitlement”:
KEYES: Obviously the state legislature rolled back a lot of the early voting days, including cutting out the Sunday before the Tuesday for voting. I’ve been speaking with a lot of voters down here and they have programs called, for instance, “Souls to the Polls” where a lot of black churches and historically Latino churches would go to church on the first Sunday of the month and then go everybody transport and vote. That’s cut out now because now it’s cut off at the Saturday before the Tuesday election. Does that concern you at all, does that bother you?
WEST: No, I think that when you look at our voting process here in the United States of America, it really comes down to you should be able to go out and vote on Election Day. If you cannot get out to vote on Election Day, you get an absentee ballot. I think that this early voting thing was something we provided and now some people see it as an entitlement, which is really not consistent with constitutional voting practices and procedures.
Early voting has no business being a partisan issue. It simply allows people who can’t reach the polls on Election Day to still participate in our democracy. It also eases the burden on election officials who can spread out the process over weeks instead of a single day. West’s opposition to a program that even Jeb Bush admits is “great” and results in “high voter turnout” is inexplicable.
By: Scott Keyes, Think Progress, May 24, 2012
“A Stacked Deck”: Rick Scott’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ Task Force All Supported The Law
Gov. Rick Scott has created a task force to review the controversial “Stand Your Ground” law, the law behind which George Zimmerman hid after shooting and killing unarmed teen Trayvon Martin. He revealed the members of the task force on Thursday, and it should come as no surprise that among the four legislators appointed, two belong to the American Legislative Exchange Council and that all four voted for the law.
One of the members, in fact, is state Rep. Dennis Baxley, who authored the law and who has said it doesn’t need to be changed. Among others:
– Sen. David Simmons, R-Maitland, co-sponsored and voted for Stand Your Ground. He told the Herald/Times bureau that he was instrumental in drafting the final language of the law as House Judiciary Committee chairman, and was Baxley’s roommate at the time.
– Rep. Jason Brodeur, R-Sanford, joined the Legislature in 2010, and the first bill he passed was a controversial gun rights bill banning doctors from asking patients about gun ownership.
– Sen. Gary Siplin, D-Orlando, voted for the bill in 2005. It passed the Senate unanimously.
Baxley and Brodeur belong to ALEC, and ALEC used Baxley’s language for the template for bills passed all over the country. The 17-member task force also includes legal professionals including state prosecutors, church leaders and neighborhood watch voluteers. It doesn’t include a number of Democratic lawmakers and opponents of the law who appear to have been shut out of the selection process. Think Progress describes the selection committee:
Lieutenant Governor Jennifer Carroll, who is also heading the task force, was a co-sponsor of the House bill and voted for it in 2005. As did fellow selection committee members Senate President Mike Haridopolos and House Speak Dean Cannon. Incoming House Speaker Will Weatherford was not in the legislature in 2005 when the law was passed, but is currently listed as a member of ALEC.”
According to this report, Carroll says the Democratic lawmakers didn’t apply to be on the task force. The Democrats all say that there was no announcement of an application process, and that their efforts to be included in the task force were ignored. Most disturbing is the point raised by Rep. Dwight Bullard, D-Miami, who points out: “The governor failed to represent that diversity by neglecting to place a single South Florida lawmaker or mayor of a large city on the task force, in essence giving no voice to the regions of the state most often plagued by gun violence.”
Because of the lawmakers included in the group—those who would actually be responsible for making changes to the law—it seems to be stacked in favor of the law before it even gets off the ground.
By: Joan McCarter, Daily Kos, April 21, 2012
“Block The Vote”: The Republican War On Voter Registration
Republican state legislatures aren’t only trying to prevent voting at the polling place, they are also stopping people from becoming registered voters in the first place. These same laws that require voters to present state issued photo identification at the polling both—nominally aimed at preventing voter fraud—also sometimes contain provisions that are placing onerous requirements and stringent limitations on third party voter registration efforts.
The targets are national and statewide organizations that use volunteers or paid staffers to canvass underrepresented communities to register new voters. Often these voters are young, poor or non-white and thus lean Democratic. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found, “54 million eligible Americans are not registered to vote. More than 25% of the voting-age citizen population is not registered to vote. Among minority groups, this percentage is even higher— more than 30% for African Americans and more than 40% for Hispanics.” Registration drives typically focuse their efforts on these historically disenfranchised populations, as well as elderly and disabled voters who may have trouble reaching a government office to register. Perversely, as the Brennan Center notes, “Instead of praising civic groups who register voters for their contribution to democracy, many states have cracked down on those groups.”
The excuse is that they wish to prevent fraudulent voter registrations from being submitted. But the result, if these rules are enforced, is that far fewer voters are registered.
In Florida, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, the law has been quite successful:
Florida, which is expected to be a vital swing state once again in this year’s presidential election, is enrolling fewer new voters than it did four years ago as prominent civic organizations have suspended registration drives because of what they describe as onerous restrictions imposed last year by Republican state officials.
The state’s new elections law—which requires groups that register voters to turn in completed forms within 48 hours or risk fines, among other things—has led the state’s League of Women Voters to halt its efforts this year. Rock the Vote, a national organization that encourages young people to vote, began an effort last week to register high school students around the nation—but not in Florida, over fears that teachers could face fines. And on college campuses, the once-ubiquitous folding tables piled high with voter registration forms are now a rarer sight.
The election of 2000 demonstrated how just a few hundred votes in Florida could determine who wins the presidency. Florida’s voter registration law is, of course, facing legal challenges. If the law remains in place, though, it could depress turnout by far more than a few hundred votes.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, March 29, 2012
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