Ron DeSantis’s Voter Suppression Machine Is Working

Florida has some of the lowest rates of registered eligible voters in the nation; there are millions of eligible voters left to register across the state. The hundreds of thousands of people who’ve moved to the state could easily swing elections. You’d think, during a major, competitive presidential election year when there’s widespread consensus that our democracy is at stake, there’d be a concerted, well-funded effort to register as many of those eligible voters as possible. And yet the opposite is happening.

“Fewer organizations are registering voters,” Frederick Velez III Burgos, a senior director at the Hispanic Federation, told me. In April 2023, Florida passed a nearly 100-page law, Senate Bill 7050, that created new requirements and penalties for organizations that register voters.

Civic organizations including the Hispanic Federation and the League of Women Voters Florida have sued the state over the law. During a trial this April, Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley said that there’s been a “a dramatic decrease” in voter registrations by third-party organizations. Cynthia Slater, civic engagement chair of the Florida NAACP, told the court that because of S.B. 7050, after more than 30 years of registering voters, the Florida NAACP has stopped organizing voter registration drives. With the District Court’s decision pending, months of legal limbo are sliding by, sacrificing what could be many, many new voter registrations during a major election year.

S.B. 7050 created a cumbersome list of requirements for voter registration groups. “It’s a way to slowly erode how efficient we are at registering voters,” Velez III Burgos told me. It also creates legal risk: S.B. 7050 makes it a third-degree felony to retain “personal information” from a registered voter, but it doesn’t clearly specify what counts as personal information. It subjects organizations to a $50,000 fine for each volunteer or staff person who has ever been convicted of a felony and has helped to register voters. A provision already declared unconstitutional levied the same fine if a noncitizen handled voter registration forms. One provision prohibits returning two or more mail-in ballots in the same envelope. Another requires groups to hand out receipts with staff or volunteers’ names. The time frame for returning ballots has been shortened. And so forth, for 96 pages.

“Something as simple as a date, for example, being incorrectly written by accident by the applicant could drastically impact an organization,” Monica Bustinza, director of democracy programs at Engage Miami, a youth civic engagement group, told me. Rebecca Pelham, the group’s executive director, estimated that complying with S.B. 7050 has made it 50 percent more expensive for the organization to register voters. She also said that Engage Miami can continue its voter registration program largely because Bustinza has a doctorate in public policy and administration, with a specific focus on elections. “We’re so lucky to have her. But if we didn’t, that would be very scary for us,” Pelham said. “You shouldn’t need a Ph.D. to run a voter registration program.”

“We can’t look at S.B. 7050 in a vacuum,” Velez III Burgos told me. In 2021, Florida enacted another voter restriction, S.B. 90, which limited the drop boxes where voters in some states can submit a completed mail ballot, among other provisions. In 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the creation of the Office of Election Crimes and Security, which refers all potential election crimes to law enforcement, the Office of Statewide Prosecution, or the local attorney office. During a spectacle his office publicized, Florida police officers arrested 20 people for voting despite being ineligible due to prior felony convictions. Several of those arrested told reporters they mistakenly believed they had the right to vote, given that a ballot amendment in 2018 restored many felons’ voting rights. The greatest chilling effect on access to the ballot in Florida, however, arguably comes from the quieter details in recent legislation like S.B. 7050.

I reported on abortion in the 2010s, and S.B. 7050 reminds me of how, years before Roe was overturned, Republican-led states shuttered hundreds of clinics through legislation like building codes that only applied to facilities that provided abortion. Like S.B. 7050, those laws limited access to (what was then) a constitutional right by increasing operational costs and penalties for organizations that helped individuals access that right. I often recall an abortion rights advocate telling me, exasperated, that it was very difficult to get even pro-choice voters to care about the length of a hallway. And yet hallway length requirements were making it prohibitively expensive to run clinics in states across the country. Similarly, the minutiae required by S.B. 7050 don’t emotionally resonate as canaries signaling the erosion of American democracy. Yet the law has transformed one of the most basic, fundamental forms of civic engagement into a political risk that few have the means to take.

One stark example: The League of Women Voters Florida, which is volunteer-run, is not conducting its usual paper-form voter registration drives this year, despite the significance of having an abortion rights amendment on the Florida ballot. Cecile Spoon, co-president of the League of Women Voters Florida, told me that the League just can’t afford their usual program while staying in compliance with S.B. 7050. The state’s cap for potential penalties is $250,000, and the League’s most recent annual budget was $268,425. “It’s so punitive it would bankrupt us,” Spoon said. “It’s a liability trap.” She estimated that the League has registered 75 percent fewer voters this year than in recent years. “It’s a huge, huge drop.”

For years, volunteers from the League of Women Voters Florida would show up at public events with their clipboards and move through the crowd helping people fill out paper registration forms, which they’d gather and send in bulk to the appropriate election office. Post–S.B. 7050, the League’s volunteers only help register voters through the state’s website—which cuts out some of S.B. 7050’s arcane mail requirements, decreasing the legal risk. But many of the places where they’re trying to register voters don’t have public internet hot spots, and volunteers, many of whom are elderly, don’t necessarily have them on their phones. The League doesn’t own a fleet of tablets or iPads, and Spoon estimated it would cost $200,000 to equip the 29 different affiliates across the state to match their usual registration numbers. “We’re scrounging to find money and see if we can get funders,” she said.

S.B. 7050’s chilling effect on voter registration is a problem for democracy, the people I interviewed said, not any specific candidate or campaign. These civic organizations are nonpartisan. “We register everyone,” Velez III Burgos said. Likewise, when political parties run voter registration drives, they legally have to register anyone, not just those who want to register as Democrats or Republicans.

That’s not to say that S.B. 7050 hits all communities equally: far from it. “One in four people of color register through a third-party organization,” Velez Burgos III told me. White Americans are significantly more likely to register through government agencies like the DMV, or by other means. Years of case law have previously established that voter restrictions have disproportionately affected racial minorities. “When we lose [the ability to register voters],” Velez III Burgos explained, “we’re losing the ability to empower our community.”

Young people are also much less likely than older people to be registered to vote. “Between the pandemic and this legislation, there’s a big voter registration gap for young people in Florida right now,” Pelham said. Young people are just coming of age to vote; they may be in college, they often move frequently, or may be unaware of the guidelines. “[They] really need multiple touches to make sure they have access to the ballot.”

Because younger voters and people of color are less likely to be registered Republicans, an issue that ought to be nonpartisan—registering voters to protect their right to vote—has become deeply politicized. Beyond Florida, Republicans in Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, and Tennessee have also recently passed laws that restrict voter registration drives.

The numbers tell a clear story: In 2020, the most recent presidential election year—before Florida passed S.B. 90 and S.B. 7050 and before Trump started with his claims about the stolen election—more than 1.1 million new voter registrations were filed in Florida. We’re almost halfway through 2024, and only 167,792 voters have been registered in the state this year.

It’s possible that national funders and civic organizations will send resources into the state just before election deadlines and help close the gap, but Floridians I’ve spoken to say that funders seem to be waiting to see how the litigation over S.B. 7050 plays out. As of May 2024, just 3,860 Floridians had been registered by third-party voter registration groups this year, compared to roughly 60,000 registered by third-party groups in 2020.

Looking further back, it’s clear that this is part of a larger trend that explains how Florida became a key testing ground for authoritarian policies, with profound implications for national politics. In 2008, when the Obama campaign built its outposts across the country, including with a large presence in Florida, roughly 420,000 Floridians were registered by third-party groups; in 2012, over 350,000 Floridians were. Those registrations likely made the difference: In 2012, Obama won the state by fewer than 75,000 votes. Those numbers show what could have been. When I reported my book on state-level organizing, many Florida Democrats and progressives told me that the turning point for Florida, the true missed opportunity, was when the Obama campaign packed up after its wins, failing to transform its networks of staff and volunteers into a durable progressive infrastructure. Instead, Florida’s under-resourced progressives were largely left to fend for themselves.   

Two feedback loops have accelerated since then. Republicans hold a supermajority in the Florida legislature, enabling them to pass increasingly authoritarian measures. That’s not because most Floridians hold extreme right-wing positions—up until 2020, registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans in the state—but because Republicans have gerrymandered the legislature for decades. With their power in the state legislature, Florida Republicans have been able to entrench their control, including through novel forms of voter suppression. For example, after Floridians voted by a wide margin to support a 2018 ballot initiative that would have restored voting rights to many Floridians with felony records, the state legislature passed a law that required those Floridians to pay all fees and fines related to their case in order to be able to vote, which disenfranchised roughly 800,000 Floridians who otherwise would have had their rights restored. In their report on the law, Lawrence Mower and Langston Taylor of the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times wrote, “Like the poll taxes of the Jim Crow era, the restrictions have especially hit Black Floridians, who make up a disproportionate share of felons and register overwhelmingly as Democrats.” 

This accumulation of Republican power has coincided with a corresponding decline in resources for Florida’s civic organizations, especially those seeking to organize working-class, Black, Latino, or young Floridians. Numerous people have told me over years that national Democrats as well as progressive and civic engagement–focused funders have not invested adequately in the state. “Over the last few years, funders have been disinvesting in Florida, and the resources that come into the state to increase engagement and civic equity have really diminished,” Pelham of Engage Miami told me. “It’s a self-reinforcing cycle, right? If you don’t provide funding to do the work, the work doesn’t get done. Fewer people, especially young people, people of color, immigrant communities are able to cast their ballots.”

I’ve also heard from dozens of people, in Florida and other states, over many years, that progressive funders tend to think in single election cycles and judge success and failure based on short-term goals of their own making. In contrast, conservative donors have tended to consistently sustain networks of local organizations for decades. Carolina Wassmer, Florida state program director, told me that one of the questions her colleagues are grappling with now is: “Is Florida still a state that funders are willing to fund, and how much are they willing to fund?”

It’s a failure of our democracy that nonpartisan civic engagement groups need millions of dollars to ensure that citizens can vote. For Democrats and progressives, the question also represents a strategic failure. To take the most immediate example: Now that Biden is at risk of losing Michigan, he absolutely needs Florida, which would’ve been an easier lift, perhaps even a safe bet, had national funders consistently supported local organizations over the years.

This year, Poder Latinx Florida, like many local groups, is running a downsized program. S.B. 7050 included a provision that prevented noncitizens from helping to register voters, the violation of which came with a $50,000-per-person fine. Velez III Burgos estimates that roughly 80 percent of Hispanic Federation’s 2022 voter registration teams were noncitizens; Wassmer estimates 90 percent of Poder Latinx’s recent teams were. Both of them told me that canvassers who are legal residents but noncitizens are effective at talking with people in Latino communities because they have the language skills and cultural knowledge, and some of them are from countries without democracies, so they can convince passersby to register by opening the conversation with something like, “Hey, I’ve never been able to vote in my life; you should exercise your right.”

The prohibitions against noncitizens and people with felony records registering voters created another cost for anyone who wanted to register voters in Florida. Everyone I spoke with emphasized that local nonprofit organizations like theirs can’t afford the fines in S.B. 7050. As Wassmer put it: “These types of fines will really take down an organization.” Therefore, to protect itself and guarantee without a doubt that a staff person or volunteer wasn’t lying about their citizenship status or criminal record, an organization would have to run comprehensive background checks on all staff and volunteers, making it prohibitively expensive for these nonprofits to hire numerous canvassers or rely on an army of volunteers.

“We had to shut down the campaign as soon as the law went into effect,” Wassmer told me. Poder Latinx Florida had to seek out legal advice and reassess, ultimately deciding: “We had to scale back. We were only able to hire one team.” Funders have been concerned about S.B. 7050’s impact. Needing to do more with less, the group slashed its target goals from 30,000 to 10,000 voter registrations over two years. “Our goal is to ramp up to two more teams, but we’re still waiting to see if that’s going to be an opportunity,” Wassmer said, citing uncertainty over how much funding will come in ahead of the election.

This May, in response to Latino groups’ challenge to the noncitizen provision, the U.S. District Court issued a decision declaring that provision discriminatory and unconstitutional. Poder Latinx is able to hire its previous canvassing teams and get to work again. They’re back, but they’ve lost precious time. As the decision says, quoting an earlier court decision regarding another Florida voter restriction: “When a plaintiff loses an opportunity to register a voter, the opportunity is gone forever.”

“There’s a reason that they’re coming after organizations, that they are trying to suppress the vote,” Pelham told me. “There’s a reason that there’s an elections police, and it’s because the work that we do matters.”