‘Can I vote?’ Florida’s new elections bill leaves voters in the dark — by design | Opinion

Under the Legislature’s latest attempt to change election laws, your voting card — the document that most people assume gives them the right to vote — would be like a Monopoly dollar bill. The latter doesn’t give you the ability to buy real products; the former wouldn’t necessarily assure you the ability to vote.

Senate Bill 7050 is a 98-page kitchen sink of voting reforms rushed through its first committee stop this week. The legislation would add a disclaimer to voting cards: “This card is proof of registration but is not legal verification of the eligibility to vote.”

In other words, it would be up to Floridians wondering about their eligibility to navigate the labyrinth of Florida election laws or risk getting arrested as 20 former felons were last year for allegedly casting illegal ballots.

This is a clean-up after some of those arrests turned out to be an embarrassment for Florida. Gov. DeSantis had held them up in triumph after pushing the Legislature to create an unnecessary election-crimes office.

Many of the accused said they thought they could vote after receiving voting cards from their local supervisors of elections. They likely assumed, as anyone with common sense would, that they were covered by a voter-approved constitutional amendment that restored voting rights for some felons. Who else was supposed to tell them they weren’t? The Department of State.

In 2020, then-Secretary of State Laurel Lee said it was the agency’s job to screen for ineligible voters and tell county supervisors to remove them from the rolls.

Felons got state’s OK

To recap, the government told those felons they could vote. And then the government arrested them for voting. Now lawmakers want to make it even easier to prosecute unsuspecting ineligible voters. Gotcha!

This is just one of many changes proposed in Senate Bill 7050. Lawmakers themselves are still digesting the proposal, given that they had less than a day to review it ahead of a Tuesday committee vote recently. The committee also ran out of time to hear from the public, as the Herald/Times reported. Parts of the legislation clearly were rushed, resulting in confusing sentences and sections that need clarification, according to sponsor Sen. Danny Burgess.

That’s a sign of the times in Tallahassee, where bills are seen as done deals before they are even filed, and members are expected to approve them with little debate. With Democrats neutered by a GOP super-majority, there’s little interest in airing out controversial proposals.

A big chunk of SB 7050 would create new requirements for third-party groups that register voters. Those groups include political parties and religious and civic organizations like the League of Women Voters. Lawmakers want to give them 10 days, instead of 14, to turn in registration forms and increase fines if they fail to meet deadlines. The bill also would require groups to give voters a receipt and re-register with the state every election cycle.

Harder to register

Burgess gives a reasonable explanation for that crack down, saying those organizations should be held accountable when they fail in their mission. The Department of State fined nine voter-registration groups a total of $41,600 last year for not turning in 3,077 applications to an election supervisor on time, the Herald/Times reported. Yet many of those groups are small organizations helping low-income and minority voters. Some of them told lawmakers they wouldn’t be able to bear the burden of increased requirements and fines. Making it harder for them to operate would hurt communities that are already marginalized from the voting process.

In 2021, the Legislature limited the use of drop boxes for mail ballots. Voters are now required to renew their requests for mail ballots every election cycle. In the past, those requests were good for two cycles, and the change resulted in almost all existing requests being canceled after the 2022 elections.

A provision in SB 7050 would invalidate two or more mail ballots that are submitted in the same mailing envelope (say, from family members living in the same home). Supporters say that’s meant to bring uniformity, given that each county currently deals with these cases differently.

Burgess said his legislation contains a lot of mundane election “maintenance” items. But we can’t disregard, given recent history, that the Legislature’s unspoken intent, once again, is to impose barriers and confuse voters.

This story was originally published April 8, 2023 at 11:37 AM.