Encouraging news! Now let’s see how this shakes out on appeal. Republicans always put so much effort into coming up with clever new ways to evade the law, but Judge Robert L. Hinkle called them out on it anyway as an unconstitutional burden:
Florida’s GOP war on (minority and Democratic) voters has two parts. First, there is the well-publicized effort to throw tens of thousands of legitimate voters off the rolls in ostensible pursuit of what may be only a handful of noncitizen voters at most.
The second, less-well-known effort, is a new set of Florida state rules that make it very difficult to register new voters, and create severe penalties for anyone who doesn’t precisely comply with them. These rules are so onerous that many groups that formerly routinely ran voter registration drives, like the League of Women Voters, stopped doing it because they found the new rules were impossible to comply with.
Now, thanks to a lawsuit by the League of Women Voters of Florida, Florida Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, and Rock the Vote, a federal judge in Tallahassee, no hotbed of liberalism, has issued a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of key parts of the voter-registration-suppression scheme:
The statute and rule impose a harsh and impractical 48-hour deadline for an organization to deliver applications to a voter registration office and effectively prohibit an organization from mailing applications in. And the statute and rule impose burdensome record-keeping and reporting requirements that serve little if any purpose, thus rendering them unconstitutional even to the extent they do not violate the [National Voting Rights Act].
