Today, LDF and a coalition of civil and voting rights groups sent a letter opposing Florida’s Senate Bill (“S.B.”) 7050 and House Bill (“H.B.”) 7067, which will make multiple unnecessary and harmful changes to Florida’s election laws. These bills will make it harder for Floridians to register and vote, and undermine Florida’s reputation in previous elections as a gold standard of election administration. These proposed laws do nothing to make voting easier or more secure, nor do they address the problems of Florida’s labyrinthine process of determining voter eligibility.
The coalition wrote in opposition to the bills because of concerns that the requirements, deadlines, and fines for voter registration organizations these bills would establish are so harsh that the impact would be a gutting of community-based voter registration in Florida. Taken together, these changes create a framework that would make it extremely difficult for nonprofit voter registration organizations to operate. We believe this framework would have the harshest impacts on smaller organizations who are closest to the communities they serve. The bills also change the vote-by-mail process and provide voters with less time to request a vote-by-mail ballot and add other unnecessary administrative burdens on voters.
Read the full letter here.
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Founded in 1940, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is the nation’s first civil rights law organization. LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute is a multi-disciplinary and collaborative hub within LDF that launches targeted campaigns and undertakes innovative research to shape the civil rights narrative. In media attributions, please refer to us as the Legal Defense Fund or LDF. Please note that LDF has been completely separate from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1957—although LDF was originally founded by the NAACP and shares its commitment to equal rights.
