Year-by-year look at Florida's increasingly restrictive election, voter registration laws

Vice President Kamala Harris' entry into the 2024 presidential race has galvanized Democrats, celebrities and young voters across the country, with campaign donations rolling in and voter registrations spiking in just the last few days since her announcement.

Will we see a surge in voter registrations in Florida? The laws are stacked against it.

In 2020, Gov. Ron DeSantis said that the state held the “smoothest and most successful election of any state.” But despite that, the Florida Legislature has passed new, more restrictive election laws every year since up to 2024.

Supporters call the changes necessary to add security and reinspire confidence in the election process. Voter rights organizations and some state election supervisors have condemned the measures saying they were unnecessary, with some critics saying they were designed to suppress the vote, especially for minorities likely to vote for Democrats.

Here's what changed.

2021: Elections bill takes aim at mail-in voting, drop boxes

In 2020, a record 14.4 million voters turned out for the Nov. 3 general election with 44% (4.6 million) of Floridians voting by mail by election day and many others using the state's plentiful ballot drop boxes. In 2021, Florida legislators passed SB 90 to limit both of those. Under the new bill:

• Vote-by-mail ballot requests must be made again every year. Requests made during 2020 were allowed to stay in place through 2022.

• Vote-by-mail ballot requests must include the form of identification that matches the voter's records, which could impact people who registered before such IDs were kept on file, students out of state or people who don't know which ID they provided last time.

• Elections officials are prohibited from sending out unrequested vote-by-mail ballots, something no Florida officials were doing.

• Ballot drop boxes, previously placed at various places around the state 24/7 and monitored by elections workers, video surveillance or law enforcement personnel, are now:

  • Limited to locations at the local Supervisor of Election's office, outside early voting sites, or other sites which would otherwise qualify as an early voting site

  • Open only during early voting hours for all drop boxes besides the one at the Supervisor of Election's office

  • Closed three days before an election

  • Monitored at all times, in person, by an election worker with a fine of $25,000 if a drop box is left unmonitored.

• Third-party voter registration groups must provide a disclaimer informing potential voters that their applications "might not" be turned in within a 14-day window imposed by the law.

• Private grants and donations are banned from helping county election supervisors run elections.

• Criminal penalties and fines are imposed for anyone “engaging in any activity with the intent to influence or effect of influencing a voter,” which critics said effectively banned handing out food and water to voters waiting in line to cast ballots.

Politico obtained text messages between GOP legislators saying it would be "devastating" not to "reset" Florida's mail ballot requests after the 2020 cycle because mail-in voting hurt former President Donald Trump.

Hours after the bill was signed, the lawsuits came. In 2022, a federal judge blocked Florida from enacting any law or regulation dealing with third-party voter registration groups, drop boxes or “line warming,” writing that the state 'has repeatedly, recently, and persistently acted to deny Black Floridians access to the franchise."

The parts of his ruling on dropboxes and voter registration restrictions were overturned in 2023 by an appeals court.

2022: Elections security force formed

SB 524 kept the ball rolling with more restrictions, harsher penalties for voter registration violations and a new task force.

• A new office was created with $3.7 million to add 15 Florida Department of State officials to investigate claims of voter fraud.

• Annual caps for fines for voter applications not submitted within 14 days from third-party voter registration groups increased from $1,000 to $50,000.

• Drop boxes were renamed to "secure ballot intake stations," forcing county election supervisors to pay to redo their training materials.

• Collecting and submitting more than two vote-by-mail ballots on behalf of other people except for immediate family members — which DeSantis frequently referred to as "ballot harvesting" — increased from a misdemeanor to a felony.

• Election officials are now required to update voter roll lists annually.

• The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles is required to provide election officials with a monthly list of people whose IDs show they are not U.S. citizens.

The Office of Election Crimes and Security reported it received over 1,300 complaints of election fraud last year but many have been dismissed and the bulk of them are still under review or investigation.

Right after the office was created it made national news with morning raids that arrested 20 former felons for having illegally voted two years earlier. Most were Black and had received government voter ID cards, believing that the 2018 passage of Amendment 4 had restored their right to vote. They were charged with third-degree felonies.

The majority of the cases were later dismissed or resulted in plea deals with no jail time.

2023: Sweeping elections bill cracks down on third-party voter registration

SB 7050 proposed 27 changes to the state's Elections Code, some of which include:

• First-time voters without a verified social security number or Florida ID are required to vote in person.

• Third-party voter registration organizations are required to re-register with the state every election cycle.

• Penalties for third-party voter registration groups returning forms late increased from $50 for each late application to $50 for every day it is late.

• The annual cap on late form violations was increased from $50,000 to $250,000.

• Third-party voter registration organizations must provide a paper receipt.

• Voter registration groups must return completed forms to election offices in 10 days, rather than the previous 14.

• Volunteers of third-party voter registration groups must not be noncitizens or felons of specific crimes. Violation means a $50,000 fine for each person.

• Required list of voter registration maintenance activities expanded.

• Florida candidates and political committees must report campaign contributions quarterly, rather than every month.

Part of the bill that would have made it a felony to harass election workers was removed before passage. The ban on noncitizens or felons collecting or handling voter registration applications was struck down in July 2023 by a federal judge for being unconstitutional.

Florida also stopped working with the Electronic Registration Information Center last year after more than three years of membership. ERIC is a data-sharing partnership between a majority of states designed to keep voter rolls accurate which was formerly praised by DeSantis but dropped after former President Trump and other election conspiracists claimed without evidence that ERIC data was helping Democrats cheat.

By the end of 2023, over a million people were declared inactive in Florida's voter rolls. The voters so marked were overwhelmingly Democrat and independent voters, according to state records.

Voter registrations through third-party groups also were significantly lower in 2023. In 2020, 59,805 people were registered to vote through 3PVRO (3rd party voter registration organizations) but by 2023 that dropped to 5,891.

So far, in 2024 with a general election coming up, only 7,139 voters have been registered through 3PVROs as of June 30.

2024: Proposed new elections bill dies in session

The number of drop boxes would have been reduced even more this year under a proposed bill from the State Affairs Committee, PCB SAC 24-06, which would have prohibited boxes at city halls, civic centers, county courthouses and fairgrounds if they are not an early voting site and limited hours even at elections branch offices to the county's early voting hours.

However, a firestorm erupted over the other major part of the bill, which would have revived the runoff primary in 2026, when Florida will elect a new governor. Runoffs were eliminated in Florida starting with the 2006 election. The bill was condemned by some GOP critics who said it was intended to hurt conservative candidates and/or help establishment Republicans maintain more control over upcoming elections and ultimately fizzled out.

Otherwise, 2024 just saw a bill passed to keep preregistration by voters 16 or 17 years old exempt from public records requests and another that prevents anyone from changing someone's party affiliation without explicit request and signature from the voter. A joint resolution passed to add Amendment 6 to the ballot, repealing public campaign financing for state candidates

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Florida election, voter registration, drop box laws tighter every year