In 2024 preview, new Florida laws for primary could make it harder to cast ballots
Floridians will cast their primary ballots Tuesday under new voting restrictions a judge once said were designed “to target Black voters,” the first such federal election under the new law.
Voting rights advocates say the new rules make it harder to request and turn in absentee ballots and register voters as well as making it easier to challenge votes once cast. But supporters say the new rules are needed to combat voter fraud.
The primary will not only serve as a preview of presidential elections in 2024, but it will also test ideas about who should be able to vote, and how easily, in what has become one of the most electorally important states in the country.
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By 2024, in fact, Florida might have even more restrictions. Its new election laws call for a committee to study rules similar to those in Texas, which led to a spike in rejected ballots in that state’s primary earlier this year.
Operating under new rules, Texas tossed out more than 12% of mailed ballots during its 2022 primary, up from what the Texas Tribune determined to be less than 2% in 2018.
“A lot of people have questions about this new law,” said Amy Keith, program director for the good government group Common Cause Florida.
New restrictions for midterms
Florida is part of a group of states that have adopted new election restrictions fueled by claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, which saw unprecedented levels of voting by mail because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump won Florida, but Republicans in state government adopted an election law in 2021.
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U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker said in a March ruling that the law was designed “to target Black voters because of their propensity to favor Democratic candidates.” But an appeals court said the law should stand for the Aug. 23 primary while it is challenged in court.
In addition, in 2022, Florida's GOP-controlled Legislature passed another set of election law changes. State Republicans hailed the changes as a victory for "election integrity," and Gov. Ron DeSantis said his state was a "national leader" in election security.
Voting rights advocates, though, fear the new laws will make it harder for voters. The League of Women Voters and other groups sued the state to stop the enforcement of Senate Bill 90, the bill adopted in 2021.
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That bill requires, for the first time, voters applying for a mail ballot to include their Florida driver's license or identification card number or the last four digits of their Social Security number. It also forces voters to apply more frequently for mail-in ballots.
But about 600,000 of Florida's 14.3 million voter registrations do not have those numbers for local election officials to cross reference because the voters used other forms of identification to prove their identity, said Dan Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida who was an expert witness for the groups challenging the law.
“For voters who have been on the rolls for a long time, they may well not have given that information," Leon County elections supervisor Mark Earley said, adding that many of Florida's elections supervisors reached out to voters who did not have the numbers on file to get the information.
Once those voters receive their ballots, the new law also limits who can return a ballot for a voter to immediate family members, and an individual can only return up to two ballots that aren't their own.
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Senate Bill 90 also requires drop boxes – rebranded later as "secure ballot intake stations" in Florida – be monitored by staff.
Election supervisors who violate the state's drop box laws could face a $25,000 fine.
“All of these changes add up to constrict (voting)," said Cecile Scoon, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida.
In April, Florida adopted another new election law, Senate Bill 524, which requires annual purges of the voter rolls, increases penalties for election crimes and creates an "Office of Election Crimes and Security" to investigate complaints of alleged voter fraud.
Scoon said she fears that the group will act as election police and scare Black voters away from the polls.
“The history is too raw, and it’s too real," she said of the South's history of keeping Black people from voting.
The stakes for 2022
Voters will pick candidates in a number of high-profile races Tuesday, including a Democratic challenger to DeSantis, who is thought to be laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign in two years.
At stake, as well, are a handful of open congressional seats during the midterm after the departure of four sitting members and the addition of another representative following the 2020 Census.
On the Senate side, Democratic Rep. Val Demings showed a comfortable lead in a recent Fox News poll over her primary opponents and also is trending ahead of Sen. Marco Rubio, the Republican incumbent. Rubio is unopposed in the GOP primary.
Florida has 29 electoral votes, meaning it is among the richest prizes during presidential elections. Donald Trump's victory there in 2016, for example, helped him win the White House.
2024 could bring more changes
Senate Bill 524 also sets the table for more potential changes in 2024 that could mirror those that led Texas election officials to reject thousands of mail-in ballots earlier this year.
The initial version of the bill required voters to provide an identification number on their mail ballots, but that was scrapped. Instead, it called for a study, due to the state Legislature by Feb. 1, 2023, on requiring voters to include identification numbers when they return mail ballots.
Earley, the president of the group representing 67 local election supervisors, has opposed the idea. The change would be expensive, Earley said, requiring extra envelopes or different envelopes that their equipment struggles to handle.
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He also worries about the "massive disenfranchisement" he said happened in Texas.
During the Texas primary on March 1, voters for the first time had to include identification numbers on the flap of an envelope for their mail-in ballots. That led to a wave of rejected ballots, about25,000 mail-in ballots out of nearly 200,000 cast statewide. That amounted to a rejection rate of about 12.4%.
The rejections affected voters of both parties, too, with 12.9% of Democratic primary mail-in ballots rejected compared with 11.8% of Republican mail-in ballots, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
“I don’t see any good way to make this work, frankly,” Earley said. “I’ve been very adamant about that.”
Contributing: The Associated Press and The Tallahassee Democrat
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Midterms: Florida gets first test of new voting laws
