How Some States Are Making It Harder to Register Voters
"Florida and some other states have put restrictions on voter registration drives, often with stiff fines that are dissuading some civic groups from taking part.
LaVon Bracy has been registering Florida voters ever since Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, because she wanted, she said, to give others the voice she was denied as a Black student in a largely white high school. In an average year, she said, the nonprofit Faith in Florida, where she serves as democracy director, used to add 12,000 new voters to the state’s rolls.
That ended last year, when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that imposed tough new rules on voter registration drives in the name of stopping fraud — and made voter registration groups that break the rules liable for fines as high as $250,000.
These days, Faith in Florida canvassers no longer help would-be voters fill out registration forms. Instead, they hand out slips of paper with a QR code that links to the state’s online registration website. And it’s not just small-time civic groups that are affected: The Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters has scaled back its trademark voter registration drives, too.
“These draconian laws and rules are like taking a sledgehammer to hit a flea,” said Cecile Scoon, a lawyer and the president of the Florida league.
The political right has long sought to winnow voter rolls in the name of stopping fraud, including a stream of challenges this year. As Democrats prepare for a sprint to capitalize on the excitement of a new presidential ticket by signing up new voters, they are finding entirely new barriers in Florida and some other states to the sorts of voter registration drives that have been a campaign staple for both parties.
The Florida law imposes new regulations, with criminal penalties for violations, on groups that sign up new voters and deliver the collected applications to election officials. For example, it allows fines of up to $2,500 if a registration form delivered to election officials contains a mistake. If a registration drive allows people with certain felony convictions to sign up new voters or handle registration applications, the fine could rise to $50,000.
The Florida League of Women Voters and other groups sued in federal court to block the law last year, and a trial was held this spring. A ruling is expected soon.
Laws similar to Florida’s have been passed recently by a number of Republican-controlled state legislatures, although none of the states are battleground states in this year’s election, so the restrictions on voter registrations are unlikely to affect the presidential election.
Kansas civic groups have curtailed their voter registration work for three years since the State Legislature there made “false representation” of an election official a crime.
“In 2020, even with the pandemic, we had registered nearly 10,000 Kansans to vote,” said Davis Hammet, the president of Loud Light, created in 2015 to mobilize the state’s young voters. “Now, we haven’t been able to register anyone.”
This year, Tennessee and Alabama banned the use of registration forms that are pre-filled with voters’ names and other details to make registering easier. Alabama also banned giving anyone cash or a gift for registering voters, as did Missouri in 2022. (In Missouri, a state court will hear arguments next month on whether to lift an injunction that has kept the law from taking effect there.)
“If the League of Women Voters pays people for parking or travel to get to a voter registration site, or gives them a free T-shirt or free lunch, are they being paid?” asked Denise Lieberman, the general counsel of the Missouri Voter Protection Coalition, who is representing the league and the N.A.A.C.P. in a suit against the law. “It’s unclear.”
State Senator Sandy Crawford, the Missouri Republican who sponsored the legislation, did not respond to requests for comment.
Suspicion from the right of voter registration groups has a long history. When an advocacy group for the poor known as ACORN submitted fraudulent registration forms to officials in some states in 2008, Republicans built it into a major campaign issue. ACORN shut down in 2010.
In 2014, Brian Kemp, a Republican who was then the Georgia secretary of state, opened an inquiry into voter registration by the New Georgia Project, a creation of the liberal state legislator Stacey Abrams, and claims that there was evidence of “substantial illegal activities” by the group. The inquiry found a few erroneous applications among the many thousands the group had collected.
In Florida, officials say the rules there are narrowly tailored to address abuses by voter registration canvassers and groups that hire them. And abuses do happen: In an April statement to a federal district court, the Florida secretary of state, Cord Byrd, cited more than 300 instances of misconduct by voter-registration groups, some of which led to prosecutions.
The rules are needed, state officials argue, because groups that collect registration applications can abuse the sign-up process by creating applications with false names or addresses, submitting applications for processing after legal deadlines, or even by selling applicants’ personal information.
That sort of behavior is largely limited to companies that make money by canvassing new voters for political campaigns or advocacy groups.
The state says voter-registration organizations still have many ways to help sign up voters, from handing out postage-paid registration applications with instructions on filling them out to letting people sign up on an iPad linked to the state voter registration website.
Leaders of civic groups say those methods are far less effective than when volunteers personally help people fill out registration forms and deliver them to an election office.
“When you’re trying to encourage people to register to vote, the process needs to be as simple as possible,” Ms. Bracy of Faith in Florida said. “And that’s just not the case in the state of Florida.”
Many conservatives remain deeply skeptical of voter-registration efforts.
“Liberal activists would have you believe every sensible safeguard to securing elections amounts to a restriction on the fundamental right to vote,” said Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project, one of several advocacy groups created by the conservative activist Leonard Leo.
Mr. Snead said: “Limits on third-party voter registration aren’t voting restrictions, they’re regulations to ensure groups that insert themselves between voters and elections meet minimum standards.”
Another conservative advocate on voting issues and president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, J. Christian Adams, argued that some groups actually disenfranchise voters by turning in applications that are error-ridden or are submitted too late for election officials to add the applicants to the rolls.
Miles Rapoport, a former Connecticut secretary of state, said laws restricting voter registration efforts fit a “pernicious and discouraging” pattern in Republican-controlled legislatures of seeking to curb access to the ballot box by potential Democratic voters.
Even so, he said he was skeptical that the laws would have a great impact in an age when most people can sign up to vote online, or even at the polling place on Election Day. In particular, he said, the looming presidential election should motivate partisans on both sides to find a way around obstacles to registering. It is not certain what effect the Florida law is having, because it is hard to know whether people who did not register through a group like the League of Women Voters might have found a different avenue.
According to the Florida Department of State, third-party voter registration groups signed up between 16,600 and 63,200 new voters each year from 2018 to 2022. In 2023, after the Florida law’s enactment, the total dropped below 5,900. At the end of May, halfway through the 2024 presidential election season, third-party groups had enrolled 5,583 new registrants.
The impact of those reduced registrations did not fall evenly, according to a report by Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political scientist, filed in the suit challenging the Florida law. State-supplied data showed that third-party groups enrolled about 1.5 percent of all white registered voters between 2012 and 2023, he said. But they registered roughly 10 percent of Black voters, 9 percent of Hispanic voters, and some 8 percent of voters who were members of other minority groups.
Registrations also have slowed markedly at Florida colleges and universities, where more than a million students are enrolled.
“You have to tell every volunteer that if they screw up, there may be a $50,000 fine,” said Connor Efrian, the president of the University of Florida College Democrats. “The consequences are that there are a lot fewer people going around the campus registering people. People are a lot more intimidated.”
Kitty Bennett and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Michael Wines is a national correspondent, writing about voting and election issues. He is based in Washington, D.C."
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