Florida Just Passed a Really Bad, Georgia-Style Voter Suppression Law. Here’s What It Does.

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Florida has had mail-in voting for decades now, and the process has always run smoothly. In fact, Donald Trump has used a mail-in ballot as a Florida resident for the past few elections. As Mother Jones reported, even while Trump urged supporters to avoid mail-in voting across the country, he made an exception for Florida. “In Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True,” Trump tweeted in August 2020. “So in Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail!”

Until the 2020 election, the mail-in voting system heavily favored Republicans. For the 2000 election, for example, the GOP sent absentee ballot request forms to all registered Republicans in a bid to increase turnout among rural and elderly voters. Then the pandemic hit, and for the first time ever in Florida, Democrats took advantage of the mail-in system, sending in or delivering 680,000 more mail-in ballots than Republicans. Per Mother Jones, 43 percent of Floridians voted by mail, and Democrats accounted for 45 percent of them compared to 31 percent for Republicans. Mail-in voting actually doubled among Black voters, the largest increase among any demographic group.  

This helps explain why the GOP-controlled Florida legislature has targeted mail-in voting in its new voter suppression bill passed yesterday. The new law, which Governor DeSantis says he will sign, voids all existing mail in requests from 2020 and requires anyone wanting to use the mail-in system to reapply for a ballot for the next election and every one thereafter. Critics charge that this places an additional hurdle when one did not exist before, and for no reason other than it will help suppress turnout among Democrats, particularly African Americans.

The burden this places on voters was not lost on Florida’s elections supervisors, none of whom believed the bill was actually necessary according to reports. “I’m literally befuddled as to why we would tweak a system that performed exceedingly well,” Pasco County GOP Supervisor of Elections Brian Corley said in a written statement reported by Spectrum News. “The current Vote-By-Mail (VBM) statutes (e.g. policies and procedures), as well as the established security procedures with regards to VBM ‘DropBoxes’ worked extremely well in Pasco County, and to my knowledge, all of Florida. The provision that voids all vote-by-mail requests will not only impact millions of Florida voters but will cause an unfunded mandate of millions of dollars to the taxpayers of our great state.”

The new law also operates to reduce dropboxes considerably by requiring that each box be physically staffed by an election worker rather than electronically monitored and by limiting who is permitted to drop off ballots on behalf of voters. The number of places the boxes are now allowed is also vastly curtailed. As ABC News noted, dropboxes now “can only be at election supervisors’ main and permanent branch offices or locations approved for early voting.” Further, excluding dropboxes at county offices, they can only be accessible during the early voting period hours of operation. Counties can, in theory, have a dropbox at the office accessible 24 hours a day through poll closing time on Election Day—but only if they pay an employee to staff it. Democrats charge this creates yet another unfunded mandate for already strapped counties. 

To make things worse, the law now prohibits outside private companies or organizations from providing any funds or election assistance to counties during an election. This is meant to undo the assistance and funds provided by Mark Zuckerberg and others to help the elections run more smoothly.

Democrats point out that GOP lawmakers are changing the election rules they themselves crafted at the very moment those rules start to work against the GOP’s interests. By placing more obstacles in the path of voters who most utilize mail-in and dropbox voting, the result will work mathematically in favor of the GOP and could tip close elections. In response, the GOP cites the need for election integrity and “guard rails” despite having no issues with prior elections whatsoever and while acknowledging that the 2020 election ran without incident.

Florida is now the seventh state to enact new restrictions on voting this year after Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming, all of which are controlled by the GOP. Voting rights and civil liberties groups have already filed several lawsuits seeking to strike down the new laws. Marc Elias, the lawyer who led the election battles against Trump to a 60-1 record, has already promised to sue when the Florida election bill becomes law.