In a rare victory for advocates of expanding voter participation in the United States, a federal court has enjoined implementation of a Florida law that would have gravely imperiled efforts to register citizens to vote in that state.  The state had enacted a law that would have imposed severe monetary penalties on volunteers and voter registration organizations—already operating on extremely limited budgets—if they did not immediately turn in the voter registration applications they collected, regardless of the circumstances. 

The law provided that any organization that had a volunteer or employee return a registration form more than ten days after it was collected, for any reason, would be fined $250 for each and every form returned late. If anyone associated with the organization, for any reason, failed to turn in the form before the registration deadline, the fine was $500 per form. If a registration form was not submitted, again for any reason—including a hurricane or a death or any other reason at all—the fine per form jumped to $5,000.  Political parties, however, were exempt from the law. 

As a result, numerous voter registration groups, particularly those active in minority and low-income communities, were forced to shut down their voter registration operations for fear of financial ruin.  The judge stopped the law from going forward on the grounds that it unconstitutionally chilled the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights to free speech and association and discriminated in favor of political parties.

As I argued in an earlier note, this appears to be part of a larger plan to make participation more difficult for already marginalized communities, perhaps for partisan gain.  In part, the judge granted the injunction because she found, like the judge who enjoined the voter identification requirement in Georgia, that the purported rationale for the restrictions—fraud—simply were unfounded. 

The defendants in the Florida case argued the new regulations were vital to fight election fraud, but the judge stated that, “the evidence in the case does not demonstrate a significant problem with voter registration applications stemming from third party voter registration organizations.”  She also said that the defendants had failed to show why the “scheme is necessary” since it is already a crime to destroy or obstruct delivery of a voter registration form. 

That fraud was not the state’s only concern was also exposed by the fact that the law exempted political parties from the fines, even though the state never showed that the parties were any less likely to be errant or malfeasant in their processing of voter registration forms.  Moreover, the state never explored alternatives, such as those recommended by The Century Foundation, to answer the problems of third party registration through training and giving voters the ability to track online and by phone their voter registration status.

The photo voter identification measures pushed in many parts of the country have all included some of these same elements.  The enactors claim strict photo identification requirements are essential to prevent fraud.  Yet they can come up with almost no instances of the only type of fraud such an ID requirement would address, voter impersonation at the polls.  They also fail to make a persuasive argument that current laws, which make it a felony to commit such voter fraud, have not been an adequate disincentive. The Georgia court in fact quoted Secretary of State Cox in its opinion as saying that it is indeed “evident that such penalties have been a sufficient deterrent.” And, in the way Florida exempted the political parties, they exempt absentee ballot voters from the identification requirements, with the knowledge of the racial and demographic disparities between who votes at the polls and who votes in person, and despite the fact that absentee ballots are the true source of election fraud to the extent it goes on in any widespread manner.

It is also not lost on anyone that the rules were a serious attack on the ability of progressive organizations, such as labor unions, to increase participation among their ranks.  As I was reminded by Thomas Frank’s column in the New York Times today, trying to put progressive organizations out of business financially is not a new tactic.  For now, and only for now, such organizations’ right to free speech without the threat of financial devastation is safe in the state of Florida.

Tova Andrea Wang is Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation.