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US judge blocks Florida’s new voter registration restrictions

Groups sued over third-party registration restrictions

A Florida voter registration application. (Copyright 2023 by WKMG ClickOrlando - All rights reserved.)

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – A federal judge blocked Florida’s newest election law, saying restrictions on third-party voter registration organizations violated the U.S. Constitution.

A coalition of third-party voter registration groups, including the Hispanic Federation and the Florida NAACP, are challenging SB 7050, which was signed into law by Gov. DeSantis and would have gone into effect July 1.

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The rules in question include a ban on noncitizens working to register citizens as voters, and a ban on allowing workers to take down voter contact information for anything other than voter registration.

The groups said the rules violated their First and 14th Amendment rights.

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The groups pointed out that any noncitizens employed by the groups were people who were legally permitted to work in the country, and banning those workers would disrupt operations.

They also said banning the groups from taking voter contact information could restrict their ability to communicate with new voters and remind them to vote afterward, and the language in the law was overbroad.

U.S. Judge Mark Walker, issuing his ruling the day before July 4, pointed out that third-party voter registration organizations were embodying democratic ideals by registering voters.

“In a land that professes deliverance of the ‘tired,’ the ‘poor,’ the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ 3PVROs encourage those who join us as citizens to also join in citizenship’s highest right and cardinal task: voting,” Walker said. “We have ‘a Republic’ only if we ‘keep it,’ our government remains ‘of,’ by,’ and ‘for the people’ only if the people are heard.”

The state had tried to argue that the federal government should abstain from the case because the secretary of state’s office was in the process of making rules that may resolve many of the issues.

Walker, an Obama appointee, disagreed, writing that the state of Florida was right to try to make sure the electoral system was trustworthy, and to regulate the third-party voter registration organizations. However, he said the Florida Legislature’s work was “shoddy tailoring between restriction and government interest,” and it fell “woefully short of satisfying the strict scrutiny this Court must apply.”

“When state government power threatens to spread beyond constitutional bounds and reduce individual rights to ashes, the federal judiciary stands as a firewall,” he wrote. “The Free State of Florida is simply not free to exceed the bound of the United States Constitution.”

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