DeSantis signs a sweeping GOP-backed election bill into law in Florida, tightening restrictions on mail voting and ballot drop boxes
- Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Thursday signed a GOP-backed election and voting bill into law.
- Senate Bill 90 tightens rules for voting by mail and restricts ballot drop boxes.
- Florida adds to a trend of Republican legislatures advancing stricter rules for voting by mail.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Thursday signed into law a major Republican-backed voting and election-administration bill that requires voters to apply for mail ballots more frequently and tightens rules on ballot drop boxes.
The state's Senate and House passed Senate Bill 90 almost entirely along party lines. State Sen. Jeff Brandes was the sole Republican in the Legislature to vote against the measure. On Friday, the last day of Florida's legislative session, the Senate approved an amended version of the bill that the House had passed two days prior.
DeSantis signed the bill at a Hilton in West Palm Beach. All media outlets were barred from covering or broadcasting the signing except for the Fox News program "Fox & Friends," which exclusively aired the event. Reporters who showed up expecting to be allowed in were turned away.
A Fox News spokesperson told Insider in a statement that the program "did not request or mandate that the May 6th event and/or interview with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) be exclusive to FOX News Media entities."
President Donald Trump carried Florida in 2020, and Republicans won back some key House seats. But the pervasive falsehood that the election was rife with voter fraud, especially because of mail ballots, has taken root in Republican-controlled state legislatures as a justification to enact restrictions on voters and election officials.
Florida joins states including Michigan and Texas in seeking not only to make rules about mail voting more stringent but to impose new requirements and penalties on election officials. Florida's law is set to go into effect on July 1.
The law's most significant provisions:
- The legislation requires Floridians to apply more frequently to vote by mail. Until now, a mail-ballot application would qualify voters to get ballots through the next two general elections. The new law will require voters to apply every year.
- All mail-ballot requests submitted before July 1 will be valid through 2022 but not 2024.
- Voters will have to provide their Florida driver's license or ID card number or the last four digits of their Social Security number when requesting a mail ballot over the phone or in person or updating the address associated with their voter registration.
- The new law tightens restrictions on ballot drop boxes. Under the law, drop boxes can be only at election supervisors' offices or early-voting sites, are limited to availability only during the early-voting period, and must be monitored full time by elections staff.
- The law says drop boxes "must be geographically located so as to provide all voters in the county with an equal opportunity to cast a ballot, insofar as is practicable."
- In 2020, many counties made drop boxes available before the start of their early-voting periods, which can begin as early as October 24 for general elections.
- Election officials will be subject to a $25,000 fine for not complying with the new drop-box rules.
- The law adds "engaging in any activity with the intent to influence or effect of influencing a voter" to the definition of prohibited solicitation by campaign volunteers and third-party groups. Unlike a previous version of the bill, it doesn't expressly ban but could prevent people from giving food and water to voters in line if such a gesture could be interpreted as "influencing a voter."
- It also expands the zone where such solicitation is banned to 150 feet of a voting line or drop box from 100 feet. Nonpartisan election officials and poll workers, however, are still permitted under the law to deliver items like water and food to voters in line.
- Florida followed Georgia in barring election officials from accepting private donations or grants, as hundreds of offices around the country did in 2020 to help bear the costs of running elections during the COVID-19 pandemic. Officials can accept donations only in the form of space or buildings to be used as voting sites.
- The law requires third-party organizations that do voter-registration drives to register with the state and follow certain requirements. It also bans mass third-party ballot collection at nursing homes and assisted-living facilities.
Other aspects of the law include requiring election officials to post real-time turnout numbers and data on the number of mail ballots counted and received on Election Day; adding testing and screening requirements for the state's online voter-registration system; clarifying rules for duplicating damaged mail ballots; and instituting public-access and transparency rules for election observers watching ballot counting and duplication.
Like legislation in Georgia, Florida's law restricts election officials from independently entering into consent decrees with litigants challenging the state's election laws and adds requirements for notifying the state's attorney general and Legislature about settlements that could conflict with existing laws.
Nearly all of Florida's county-level election supervisors have opposed the legislation, saying the restrictions on drop boxes in particular could lead to long lines at the polls and make their jobs more difficult.
Advocacy groups filed two federal lawsuits seeking to block the law almost immediately after DeSantis signed the bill.
Groups including the League of Women Voters of Florida, Black Voters Matter, and the Alliance of Active Retirees filed a lawsuit in federal court aiming to block the law on First Amendment grounds.
A separate lawsuit filed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Common Cause, and Disability Rights Florida challenged the law under the Voting Rights Act and the First, 14th, and 15th Amendments.
Florida Republicans' move to crack down on mail voting is a stark departure from the state's years of nationally recognized success with scaling up mail voting and counting ballots quickly and efficiently.
In the years after the 2000 election debacle and especially in the past decade, Florida emerged as a model state for election administration by expanding early voting and mail voting and modernizing the tabulation process.
Before the 2020 election, voting by mail was popular among older Republican voters. But after Trump and the GOP spent months undermining confidence in voting by mail, over 680,000 more Democrats than Republicans cast their ballots by mail in Florida.