The Guardian recently did a deep dive into the chilling effect some of Florida’s new election regulations are having on voter registration. And if we still had a functioning Supreme Court, you might assume the voter suppression laws the state has passed would be summarily struck down. But we don’t, so outrage—and, of course, getting out the vote where and when we still can—appears to be our only recourse.
According to The Guardian, Florida has levied more than $100,000 in fines against 26 voter registration groups since last September over what any reasonable person would deem a series of honest—and largely unpreventable—mistakes.
In other words, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the surly Southern suzerain who perpetually looks as if a Pekingese in a Kwanzaa sweater has spent the past 20 minutes humping his shin, is doing his best to turn his state into a permanent Republican redoubt. And, sadly, in many ways, he’s already succeeding.
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The Guardian:
The fines, which range from $50 to tens of thousands of dollars, were levied by the state’s office of election crimes and security, a first-of-its-kind agency created at the behest of DeSantis in 2022 to investigate voter fraud. Voter fraud is extremely rare, and the office has already come under scrutiny for bringing criminal charges against people who appeared to be confused about their voting eligibility.
In other words, Ol’ Puddin’ Fingers is puttin’ his grubby thumb on the scale again. If you’re a longtime fan of democracy, you likely remember DeSantis’ systematic campaign to round up outlaws who had no clue they were breaking the law by voting. It smacked of voter intimidation, because it was.
Election watchdogs worry the new policies could have a chilling effect on engaging voters. There has already been a drop in voter registrations this year compared with 2019 – the last full year leading into a presidential election, according to Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida. Through 1 June of this year, 2,430 new registrations had come from third-party voter registration organizations, he said. That’s on pace to be a sharp decrease from the 63,212 new voter registrations third-party groups submitted by the end of 2019.
A crackdown on third-party voter registration groups is also likely to disproportionately affect Floridians of color, who are about five times more likely to register with third-party groups than white voters are.
Well, there you have it: I buried the lede. Then again, overt bigotry is always the lede in any DeSantis-adjacent tale. But there it is, spelled out in Black and brown: DeSantis’ new policies and office of election crimes say it all. He would prefer that Floridians of color stop voting.
“The message is clear, [third-party voter registration organizations] are an endangered species in Florida. And it affects this population disparately,” said Smith, the UF political science professor who is helping opponents of the new restrictions challenge them in federal court. “When you start to ratchet down the ability for groups and their First Amendment rights to petition … government by getting people registered to vote, you are going to affect that overall population of registered voters.”
While the new regulations may not be quite as egregious as a Jim Crow-era poll tax or literacy test, they’re undeniably a tool the government can use to separate voters—particularly Democratic-leaning voters—from the ballot box.
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For instance, one nonprofit The Guardian cited, the Hispanic Federation, was notified in May that it was being fined $7,500 because a mere 15—out of more than 16,500—voter registrations were sent to the wrong county. Reporters Sam Levine and Andrew Witherspoon reviewed those applications and found that “in nearly all of them, the voter incorrectly wrote on their own applications that they lived in Polk County. In many cases, the address they listed was just over the county line in Osceola County.”
One voter lived just 300 feet from the county line, while another lived 660 feet away. The Hispanic Federation paid the fine, but called the levy a “gross misapplication” of the law.
“Despite our good faith efforts, professionalism, and due diligence, we cannot eliminate some applications from being processed with errors as we have not been given access to an official mechanism to verify the information of each applicant—which is, in any case, not our role,” the group stated. “There is no claim that we intentionally misrepresented, nor is there a claim that we diverted, such registrations from the correct county or that we held on to the registrations beyond the required period in which they were to be delivered.”
While any reasonable person would conclude that the Hispanic Federation should not have been dinged to the tune of $7,500 for a small handful of honest mistakes, the harshness of the penalty is almost certainly a feature and not a bug.
While this law—unlike voter suppression efforts that target nearly nonexistent voter fraud—actually is addressing a real problem, it’s clearly not a problem that justifies this level of disenfranchisement.
The law, which stipulates a $500 fine for each registration form that’s submitted to the wrong county, was instituted after election officials complained that they were getting deluged with outside applications, which created an extra burden for workers. Last year, the Florida legislature raised the maximum fine third-party registration groups could receive from $1,000 to $50,000. That cap was then raised again earlier this year to $250,000. Late submissions (Florida shortened the deadline for turning in completed forms from 14 days to 10) are also subject to a $50 fine per application.
Clearly, that’s had an impact on these organizations’ operations. In fact one group, the for-profit Hard Knocks Strategies, has been fined $47,600 since 2022 for submitting forms late and to the wrong jurisdiction. Another group, Poder Latinx, received a $26,000 fine for sending 52 applications to the wrong county.
DeSantis and his ex-bestie, in better days
“We’re a small voter registration organization with a long history of playing by all the rules. We had to pay the penalties in Florida to avoid even costlier litigation, but paid them without admission of wrongdoing,” Hard Knocks Strategies stated. “Are voter registration organizations on the right being targeted as aggressively and frequently in Florida as those seeking to register voters of color and other underrepresented communities? Given Gov. DeSantis’ track record, that question may be rhetorical.”
Gee, ya think?
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Consider Rosemary McCoy, who runs the nonprofit Harriet Tubman Freedom Fighters. She recently received a $600 fine for submitting 12 late applications. As she notes, one of the reasons applications get submitted late is that her group does quality control—to make sure they’re complete and accurate.
“That’s a hefty fine,” said McCoy. “The purpose of these fines is to stop us, stop us from registering people. … Someone has to get out there and register people and that’s what we do.”
Well, yeah, it is. But DeSantis clearly doesn’t want you to do it. And if our country is foolish enough to look past his creepy cackling and elect him president, democracy may end up being little more than a fond memory to soothe us in our old age.
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