There is mixed news from Tallahassee about the most important American principle: the right to vote. Redistricting is going a bit better than usual. Voting rights are going backward.
The decision of Fair Districts and other voting advocates to file no Supreme Court challenge against the Legislature’s House and Senate maps reflects the effectiveness of the anti-gerrymandering initiatives the voters approved in 2010. The maps are fairer than they used to be.
Although not perfect — notably for lack of transparency in the drafting process — the House and Senate plans signify that the chamber leaders read the Constitution better than Gov. Ron DeSantis does despite his Harvard law degree. However, the maps may still be challenged in lower courts, where there would be more time to consider them carefully.
The rabidly partisan governor continues to demand a flagrantly unconstitutional congressional districting. It is aimed brazenly at electing two more Republicans and two fewer Democrats and wiping out the minority-access seat of Rep. Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee, a Black Democrat. Fortunately, the Florida Supreme Court refused to write an advisory opinion that DeSantis hoped would give him cover.
The Fair Districts initiatives, passed as constitutional amendments by voters in 2010, prohibit “denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or to diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice.” They also forbid districts drawn “with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.”
Sad to say, the House and Senate leaders come out no better than DeSantis on the rest of their election agenda.
They intend to ban ranked-choice voting, severely curtail the people’s right to amend the Constitution by the petition-initiative process, establish DeSantis’ election police, create new traps to disqualify tens of thousands of mail ballots, and harass election supervisors with new busywork requirements for combing and purging voter rolls.
Some supervisors are already threatening to quit over their personal exposure to high fines in the 2021 law that’s under challenge in a Tallahassee federal court.
The new mail ballot provisions, strikingly similar to what Texas enacted last year, require the ballot to be returned inside a security sleeve inside a new “security envelope” that must bear either the voter’s driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number before the wad of documents is stuffed into the mailing envelope.
Make any mistake, and the ballot won’t be counted. That’s in Senate Bill 524 and House Bill 7061, this year’s comprehensive voter suppression legislation.
What’s happening in Texas shows why it’s bad legislation. With a primary approaching on March 1, mail ballot rejections were running at 40% in Harris County and up to 25% in a suburb of Austin. Applications for those ballots, which require the same picayune details, were being turned down at nearly the same rates.
As in the Florida legislation, the Texas law provides for giving voters an opportunity to come in and “cure” the defects. That is spiteful harassment of voters and election supervisors alike, based on the cynical assumption that many voters won’t bother or be notified in time.
Signatures alone should be sufficient, as they were for generations, because they can be matched against registrations.
Amid all that unfounded zeal, the ruling party shows no interest in investigating strong evidence of real-life, actual fraud. There is an apparently organized campaign to fraudulently re-register voters as Republicans. The perpetrators can be charged as felons, but there should be severe financial penalties for their sponsors as well.
As for ranked-choice voting, the Republicans intend to ban it before it’s even tried in Florida. They don’t want anyone to know how it might nominate moderate, consensus candidates, discourage nasty campaigning, and end the necessity for poorly attended municipal runoffs. Clearwater and Sarasota wanted to try it in their local elections but gave up for lack of cooperation from the secretary of state.
Ranked-choice voting, sometimes known as an instant runoff, has caught on from San Francisco to New York City and from Alaska to Maine and more than 40 places between. It would vastly improve Florida politics.
New York City had a hugely successful ranked-choice Democratic primary last year that nominated Eric Adams, a Black man who is an ex-cop, out of a 13-candidate field that also included Andrew Yang. The process “yielded a moderate leader in a seemingly progressive city,” wrote Christina Greer, a Fordham University political scientist, in a New York Times op-ed.
Also under attack is the ability of Florida’s people to amend their own Constitution through the initiative process — as they did with the Fair Districts amendments.
Not satisfied with already having made it harder and costlier to obtain the necessary signatures, the sponsors of HJR 1127 and SJR 1412 are trying to amend the Constitution to limit initiatives to “matters relating to procedural subjects or to the structure of the government or of this constitution.”
That would have excluded the $15-an-hour minimum wage initiative that just over 60% of the voters approved in 2020 as well as the class size, smoke-free workplace and pregnant pig initiatives in 2002, among others.
There’s a plausible argument that such details don’t belong in a constitution. But Florida citizens have no other way to get around a Legislature that the big lobbies seem to own.
Florida should enable its citizens to enact ordinary laws by initiative, as seventeen other states do. That would relieve pressure on the Constitution.
When the Senate Ethics and Elections Committee took up the amendment, more than 40 citizens signed up to speak against it or register opposition. They were an ad hoc coalition of environmental, labor, civil rights and good-government groups and concerned citizens. The only lobbyist in support represented the Florida Chamber of Commerce.
The people lost on a party-line vote that day, but they’ll have the last word if this reprehensible amendment makes the November ballot.
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