U.S. District Judge Mark Walker has knocked down a key element of the Republican-backed state law sharply curbing voter registration efforts for the anti-democratic measure that it is.
HB 7050 was born of cynical fictions, a near-textbook example of Tallahassee’s effort to keep people from voting this November for anyone from any party.
To do so, it kneecaps third-party voter registration groups such as the League of Women Voters of Florida, which suspended use of paper applications in its registration work, which was what the Legislature wanted all along.
Judge Walker’s May 15 decision permanently bars enforcement of one part of that effort: Under HB 7050, non-U.S. citizens could not register citizens to vote.
But did you know this? Non-citizens already handle mail ballots at post offices. Non-citizens are allowed to work for the Florida Elections Commission.
Conspiratorial visions
This section of the bill seemed designed to conjure up conspiratorial visions of undocumented immigrants itching to undercut American voters.
Ignored were people legally in the country such as Veronica Herrera-Lucha, who supported her family of four by helping register Florida voters.
Had she been asked, Herrera-Lucha might have used her expertise to help pinpoint the constitutionally dubious provisions of the bill: She has a law degree and an additional master’s in international law.
Legislators spouting platitudes about election integrity made sure that no one had time to understand what was in the sprawling elections bill, though, and if they did, would not have enough time to raise questions and propose fixes.
Instead, the 98-page bill dropped late in the 2023 session. Lawmakers had only hours to read it before the first public hearing.
On the House floor, where leaders waived rules to rush it through, lawmakers had two minutes and 40 seconds to pitch amendments.
So, exactly what fraud justified this legislative sneak attack and slamming the brakes on registering voters in a presidential election year?
Backers struggled to name even one.
Fake registrations: 0.0003%
To put the performative outrage into perspective, consider the hard-right Heritage Foundation’s voter fraud database. Heritage has for years played fast and loose with data, mixing inadvertent mistakes and cases where a single vote was involved with cases of serious fraud.
Even Heritage could scrounge up only three Florida cases of criminal voter registration fraud since 2020.
The cited cases involved no more than 30 voter registrations confirmed to have been faked by registration fraudsters in three years. That’s 0.0003% of the roughly 11 million registered Florida voters who cast ballots in the last presidential election.
On the other hand, Heritage cited five Floridians living at The Villages who were popped for voting twice in the same election.
Lawmakers are not expected to clamp down on voting in the GOP stronghold, however: Curbing voting for many based on wrongdoing by a few would be foolish.
To their credit, 21 of 26 Broward and Palm Beach County legislators voted against the bill.
Outrageous fines
It’s true that there are known problems with third-party voter registration groups. But it’s hard to tie them to the intimidations underpinning HB 7050.
Failing to turn in a registration within 10 days triggers a $50 a day fine.
Aggregate fines incurred by a voter registration group for late-returned applications topped out at $1,000 in 2021. Now, those fines go as high as $250,000.
Further, groups can face felony charges and risk prison time for keeping identifying information about voters, undercutting get-out-the-vote efforts as election day nears.
It’s easy to quantify the impact. It’s easy to pinpoint who is being disenfranchised, too. Eligible Black and Hispanic citizens are five times more likely to register through third party groups than prospective white voters.
It’s already illegal
Look for the fact-free crowd to try and score talking points off Walker’s decision anyway, conflating non-U.S. citizens legally registering U.S. citizens with new calls to criminalize voting by immigrants here illegally.
It’s already illegal for undocumented immigrants to vote in federal elections. It was illegal even before voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2020 to prohibit the practice.
This kind of misleading rhetoric goes beyond a bad-faith law. It’s dangerous.
Every time a Florida politician uses their bully pulpit to insist, without evidence, that the election system is in some way broken, overrun with scheming immigrants and serving no decent American, they are encouraging Floridians to believe that elections can’t be trusted at all.
A little scapegoating, a couple of shibboleths, a few moments of microphone-ready bluster and it’s a short trip back to January 6: After all, if elections can’t be trusted, they will claim, neither can the results.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.