Florida lawmakers’ xenophobic excuse for voter suppression gets dressed down in court | Opinion

Since the Big Lie of 2020, Florida Republican lawmakers have deployed insidious attacks against voter access. Their most recent effort crumbled under scrutiny by a federal judge. It was rooted, like many policies in Florida these days, in xenophobic and unfounded assumptions about immigrants.

A new law banned noncitizens — even those in the country legally, for example, on a green card — from handling voter-registration forms and would fine third-party organizations that hired them a whopping $50,000.

Another part of the law made it a felony for those organizations to copy a voter’s registration or keep their personal information. On the surface, that looks like an innocent data privacy effort. But the NAACP, one of the groups that sued the state, claimed in court that grassroots organizations keep a voter’s information after registering them to contact them to encourage them to vote in elections. This is old-school voter engagement, which might be the real target of lawmakers’ stated concern for election integrity.

U.S. Chief District Judge Mark E. Walker blocked both portions of the law this week. Walker, who was appointed to the bench by Barack Obama, has struck down many a Florida law but some of his rulings were reversed on appeal. The state it is all but certain to ask the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to take up the case.

Still, Walker, sometimes known to inject sarcasm in his rulings, spotted the gaping hole in the state’s explanations for its onerous new requirements.

“The Free State of Florida is simply not free to exceed the bounds of the United States Constitution,” Walker wrote, a dig at Gov. Ron DeSantis’ overused catch phrase.

Attorneys representing the DeSantis administration tried to argue that noncitizens are less likely to turn in voter applications to the state on time because they might leave the country. That argument is not only nonsensical — a U.S. citizen could more easily leave for another state — but offensive and discriminatory. The 14 Republicans representing Miami-Dade who voted for Senate Bill 7050 should know this community was built by immigrants — many of them not yet citizens — who are fully committed to this country. Unfortunately, no Republican had the nerve to oppose the bill because it also included a provision that allowed DeSantis to run for president without having to resign.

Boasting that Florida doesn’t allow foreigners to meddle in our elections sounds like an easy sell to DeSantis’ base. The word “noncitizen” is sure to conjure images of people crossing the southern border, not those who entered the country legally, whether through asylum or sponsorship by a family member or employer.

One of those immigrants is Esperanza Sanchez, a green-card holder from Colombia who told the court she was studying for her U.S. citizenship exam. Sanchez works for one of the plaintiffs in the case, UnidosUS, a Latino civil rights organization, where she supervises a team of 15 election canvassers. The law would put her job at risk, she wrote in a sworn declaration to court. She attested more than 80% of her canvassing team members also are noncitizens.

The state’s lawyers didn’t present any evidence to prove immigrants “have such a fleeting presence in this country as to justify a wholesale ban on their collecting or handling voter registration applications,” Walker wrote in his ruling.

Under this law, Florida would be hypocritical and inconsistent on how noncitizens can be employed. As Walker pointed out, noncitizens are allowed to work at state and local agencies that handle voter forms, such as supervisor of elections and driver license offices.

Like previous election laws passed recently in Florida, SB 7050 wasn’t rooted in problems that need solving. Florida is among the states that made voting harder after Donald Trump claimed the 2020 elections were rigged. While they complimented the Sunshine State for running an efficient and fair election, Republicans also cracked down on vote-by-mail and created a new elections crime office that DeSantis demanded.

It has also been the Florida Legislature’s M.O. to write vaguely-worded bills that leave much up for interpretation, creating fear and repression instead of clarity. The prohibition on keeping voter data, Walker wrote, doesn’t spell out “to whom the prohibition applies, what they can retain, and when they can retain it.” In other words, organizations are left guessing who in their staff would be prosecuted for keeping information as part of their get-out-the-vote mission, Walker wrote.

Walker’s ruling exposes the true intent of the law. It’s not a genuine effort to hold voter-registration organizations accountable. It’s designed, instead, to suppress voter participation.

Certainly, the state has an interest in ensuring that these groups submit voter forms to election offices in a timely manner — and those that don’t should be penalized.

But onerous requirements like those contained in this law make the mission of engaging marginalized communities harder, a tactic Republicans have deployed annually since 2020.

Laws like these — and the politicians who back them — hide behind the guise of election security. But their effects are all the same: making democracy harder to practice.