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Gov. Rick Scott said he was pleased with the ruling.
“Anytime that we have the opportunity to make our own decisions, I think that’s great for our state,” Scott said.
Scott’s chief elections official, Secretary of State Ken Detzner, said the result makes it easier for the Legislature to change election laws and that disaffected groups can still file legal challenges.
“It will be better without the Justice Department looking over our shoulder all the time,” Detzner said.
Detzner’s predecessor, Kurt Browning, challenged the preclearance requirement in 2011, calling the formula “arbitrary and irrational.” The challenge was set aside when the Justice Department cleared four voting law changes under scrutiny at the time.
Florida spent $821,000 in legal fees since August 2011 to get preclearance for changes approved by the Legislature and Scott in 2011.
“This ruling is devastating,” said Sen. Arthenia Joyner, D-Tampa, a young civil rights activist in the 1960s. “This is what I fought for as a college student. This court has taken a giant step backward.”
Deirdre Macnab, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, predicted the decision would mean “disastrous chaos” for Florida.
“On the heels of one of our greatest embarrassments, eight-hour lines, four-day delays in counting votes, Florida citizens are left without protection from the clear pattern of partisan manipulation of our voting rights,” she said.
Florida’s five affected counties were first subjected to federal preclearance in 1975 because fewer than half of the adults in the counties were registered to vote, they had non-English speaking populations of more than 5 percent and election materials were printed only in English.
Hillsborough also qualified for preclearance under a separate provision of Section 4, which compared the literacy rates of Spanish speakers in Hillsborough to the national average.
In its lawsuit, Shelby County, a suburb of Birmingham, Ala., said a 25-year extension of the law approved by Congress in 2006 would extend Washington’s oversight until 2031. The county said that overlooked changes such as elimination of racial disparities in voter registration and voter turnout.
But the Obama administration and civil rights groups pointed to the Justice Department’s efforts to block mandatory voter ID laws in South Carolina and Texas last year as well as a redistricting plan in Texas that a federal court found discriminated against the state’s large and growing Hispanic population.
Tampa Bay Times staff writers Aaron Sharockman and Bill Varian contributed to this report, which includes information from The Associated Press.
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