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      Supreme court to review whether South Carolina map discriminated against Black voters

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      When South Carolina Republicans set out to redraw the state’s seven congressional districts after the 2020 census, they had a clear goal in mind: make the state’s first congressional district more friendly for Republicans.In 2018, Democrat Joe Cunningham won the seat in an upset. In 2020, Republican Nancy Mace barely won it back. Now, Republicans wanted to redraw the district, which includes Charleston and stretches along the south-eastern part of the state, to be much safer. There was an easy way to do this – change the lines to add reliably Republican areas in three different counties to the district.But there was a problem. The old district was about 17.8% Black and the new additions would make it 20% Black, enough to make it politically competitive. So the mapmaker Republicans tasked with coming up with a new plan began removing Black voters in Charleston from the first district, placing them in the neighboring sixth district, which is represented by Democrat Jim Clyburn. Ultimately, he removed more than 30,000 Black voters – 62% of Charleston’s Black population in the district – out of it. Mace comfortably won re-election in 2022.Whether or not that removal was constitutional is at the center of a case the supreme court is set to hear on Wednesday called Alexander v South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.A three-judge panel ruled in January that Republicans had undertaken an “effective bleaching” of the district, deliberately sorting Black voters based on their race. That kind of racial sorting violates the US constitution’s 14th amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law. It was “more than a coincidence” that the new, more-Republican configuration of the first district had the exact same percentage as Black voters as the old one. The court said Republicans had adopted a racial target of a 17% Black district and drawn the lines to meet it.Any decision striking down the lines is likely to make the first congressional district more competitive for Democrats, who are seeking to cut in to the razor-thin majority Republicans hold in the US House next fall.But South Carolina Republicans say their decision to move voters was based on partisan motivations, not racial ones. The mapmaker, Republicans say, didn’t even consider racial data when he was drawing the plans. The map South Carolina Republicans enacted is the only plan offered that increases the Republican vote share while all the ones proposed by the plaintiffs turned it into a majority-Democratic district, lawyers for the state wrote in their briefing to the supreme court.“If left uncorrected, the decision below will serve as a roadmap to invalidate commonplace districts designed with a political goal,” lawyers for the state wrote in their briefing to the supreme court.While the US supreme court has long prohibited racial gerrymandering – sorting voters into districts based on their race with no legitimate purpose – it said in 2019 that there is nothing the federal courts can do to stop gerrymandering for partisan aims.The South Carolina case is being closely watched because a ruling approving of the state’s redistricting approach could give lawmakers much more leeway to use partisanship as a pretext for unconstitutionally moving voters based on their race. That could be a boon to lawmakers in the US south, where voting is often racially polarized.While the current conservative court has been extremely hostile to voting rights in recent years, litigants have had some success in similar racial gerrymandering cases. In a 2017 case, for example, the court struck down two North Carolina congressional districts because Republicans in the state had relied too much on race with no legitimate purpose.“The sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other (including political) characteristics,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a footnote in the majority opinion.“This case stands for the proposition that you cannot use partisanship as a guise to harm Black communities,” said Antonio Ingram II, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), which is representing the challengers in the case. “You cannot use political goals or interests in order to harm Black voters. Black voters cannot be collateral damage to craft partisan gerrymanders.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo bolster their argument, the challengers retained a statistical expert, Harvard professor Kosuke Imai, who produced 10,000 simulated maps that did not take race into account. None of those 10,000 simulations produced a Black voting age population in the first congressional district than the plan Republicans adopted.Another expert witness for the plaintiffs analyzed the areas that were moved from the first congressional district to the sixth to see if there was any correlation between race or partisanship and the likelihood it would be moved. The analysis found that the racial makeup of an area was a better predictor of whether it would be moved than its partisan composition.There are also allegations that Clyburn, one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington, condoned adding Black voters to his district and assisted the legislature in coming up with a plan to do so. Clyburn has strongly disputed those allegations and filed a friend of the court brief urging the supreme court to uphold the lower court’s finding and strike down the first congressional district.The justice department also filed a brief urging the court to uphold the lower court’s ruling and strike down congressional district 1. “The court permissibly found that race predominated in the drawing of CD1 because mapmakers relied on race to achieve their partisan goals,” Elizabeth Prelogar, the solicitor general, wrote in a brief.Ingram, the LDF attorney, said that the map South Carolina Republicans had implemented would ultimately make it harder for Black voters along the coast of the state to get someone to advocate for them on issues like climate change. He noted that voters in Charleston, near the coast of South Carolina, who were being attached to CD-6, were being annexed into a largely inland district.“This is about Black voters not having champions in their own communities that are responsive to their needs that are influenced by their electoral power to really advocate for federal allocation of resources without things that will improve their quality of life.” More

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      Alabama’s new congressional map increases power of Black voters

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      Alabama officially has a new congressional map that will increase the power of Black voters in the state, giving them the chance to elect their preferred candidate in at least two of the state’s seven congressional districts in 2024. The decision could help Democrats secure a majority in the US House next year.After the US supreme court twice rebuffed Alabama’s request to block drawing an additional district, a three-judge panel chose the new map on Thursday from three proposals offered by Richard Allen, a court-appointed special master. Black voters make up about a quarter of the population in the state, but comprised a majority in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts under the map Republicans adopted.The new plan maintains a majority in one of the state’s districts and creates a second district where Black voters make up 48.7% of the population. That percentage is enough to allow Black voters in the district a chance to elect the candidate of their choosing, the special master’s analysis showed.Black-preferred candidates in the district would have won 16 or 17 recent elections analyzed by the special master. The plan the judges chose splits just six counties and left the cities of Mobile and Birmingham largely whole. In total, the panel ruled, the proposal they adopted made as few changes necessary from the plan the legislature adopted to cure the illegal dilution of Black votes.The new district stretches from the city of Mobile across Alabama’s Black belt, named for its rich topsoil. The region has been marked by extreme poverty and the new district will give voters there more of a voice at the federal level.“Under the Voting Rights Act and binding precedent, the appropriate remedy for racially discriminatory vote dilution is, as we already said, a congressional districting plan that includes either an additional majority-Black district, or an additional district in which Black voters otherwise have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice,” the judges said in their order. “This plan satisfies all constitutional and statutory requirements while hewing as closely as reasonably possible to the Alabama legislature’s 2023 plan.”Voting in Alabama is highly racially polarized, with Black voters preferring Democrats and white voters preferring Republicans in a general election. Any district that allows Black voters to elect the candidate of their choosing is therefore likely to favor Democrats. Republicans currently have a razor-thin 221-212 advantage in Congress’s lower chamber.The Alabama secretary of state, Wes Allen, a Republican elected last year, said in a statement the state would “facilitate the 2024 election cycle in accordance with the map the federal court has forced upon Alabama and ordered us to use”.Alabama Republicans fought aggressively to try and stave off creating an additional Black opportunity district. After the three judge panel initially struck down its map last year, it appealed to the US supreme court, which upheld the lower court’s ruling in a surprise move. Alabama then essentially defied both courts, drawing a new map that preserved a Black majority in just one district and increased the Black population in a second district to 41%, not enough to give Black voters the chance to elect the candidate of their choosing.The three-judge panel bluntly rejected that effort, saying it was “disturbed by the evidence that the state delayed remedial proceedings but ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy”.Alabama again appealed to the US supreme court, which declined to step in and stop redrawing of the map.The case is seen as a major victory for section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits any practice that discriminates on the basis of race. Conservatives have long sought to hollow out the law by making it harder to prove racial discrimination under section 2. The fact that the conservative US supreme court agreed Alabama had crossed a line in this case was understood as a signal that the provision still has some force. Litigation is proceeding on similar grounds in Louisiana and Georgia, which could result in similar additional Black opportunity districts. Last week, the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit took the highly unusual move of stepping in to halt the redrawing of the state’s congressional map.“In spite of the shameful intransigence of Alabama Republicans, justice has finally prevailed in the state. With this new, fairer map, and for the first time ever, Black voters in Alabama could have two members of Congress representing their interests at the same time. This historic development will strengthen voting rights and ensure equal representation for so many Americans,” said the former attorney general Eric Holder, whose non-profit backed some of the plaintiffs in the case.He added: “Other states with pending section 2 cases should view this map, and this process, as both an example of basic fairness and a warning that denying equal representation to Black voters, violating the Voting Rights Act, and defying federal court orders is a direct tie to an odious past and will no longer be tolerated.” More

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      Federal judges reject Republicans’ redrawn congressional map in Alabama

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      A panel of federal judges has struck down Alabama’s redrawn congressional map, saying the state clearly continued to violate the Voting Rights Act and had ignored a clear mandate from the federal judiciary to increase the political power of Black voters in the state.The panel said a court-appointed special master and cartographer would draw a new map before the 2024 election. Alabama is expected to appeal the decision to the US supreme court, which upheld an earlier ruling ordering the state to redraw its map.The decision is a win for Black voters in Alabama, who have long had their political influence cracked among several congressional districts.“We do not take lightly federal intrusion into a process ordinarily reserved for the state legislature,” the panel wrote. “But we have now said twice that this Voting Rights Act case is not close.“The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.”Analyses have shown voting in Alabama is highly racially polarized – Black voters prefer Democrats while white voters prefer Republicans. So an additional majority-Black district is likely to favor a Democratic congressional candidate in a general election. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican speaker of the House, was in touch with Alabama Republicans while they redrew their map as he prepares to try to hold on to the narrow advantage Republicans have in the US House next year.The order on Tuesday strikes down a remedial map Alabama Republicans passed earlier this summer after the three-judge panel ruled the congressional plan that the state passed in 2021 violated the Voting Rights Act.Black people comprise about a quarter of the eligible voting population in Alabama, but they were a majority in only one of the state’s seven congressional districts. Plaintiffs showed it was easy to draw a reasonably configured second majority-Black district that stretched across the Black belt, a rural swath of Black voters in Alabama that is one of the poorest regions in the US. The three-judge panel told the state last year it needed to draw a map that had a second-majority Black district “or something quite close to it”. The US supreme court agreed in June.But Alabama lawmakers did not appear to make much of an effort to comply with the ruling. The new map they enacted still had one majority-Black district and a second one that was only about 41% Black.“We are disturbed by the evidence that the state delayed remedial proceedings but ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy,” the three-judge panel wrote on Tuesday. “And we are struck by the extraordinary circumstance we face.“We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature – faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district – responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district.”The decision was unanimous from Stanley Marcus, an appellate judge on the 11th circuit, as well as US district judges Anna Manasco and Terry Moorer. Marcus was appointed by President Bill Clinton while Manasco and Moorer were appointed by Donald Trump.“Once again, Alabama has openly defied our laws in order to disenfranchise Black voters. Thankfully, the district court has rejected Alabama’s defiance. The court has once again confirmed that Black voters deserve two opportunity districts. We look forward to ensuring that the special master draws a map that provides Black voters with the full representation in Congress that they deserve,” said Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, that represents some of the challengers in the case, which include Alabama voters and civic action groups.The court-appointed special master, Richard Allen, a former deputy chief attorney general and commissioner of the Alabama department of corrections. The cartographer is David Ely, a California-based redistricting expert who has advised numerous states and localities on redistricting issues.The court gave the two men until 25 September to come up with three proposals that “include either an additional majority-Black congressional district, or an additional district in which Black voters otherwise have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice”. Their proposals must also comply with the Voting Rights Act and other constitutional requirements.“Sixty years ago, former governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door to stop Black people from desegregating the University of Alabama. He moved only when the federal government forced him to do so. History is repeating itself and the district court’s decision confirms that Alabama is again on the losing side. We demand that Alabama again move out of the way and obey our laws – we demand our voting rights,” groups representing the plaintiffs said in a joint statement. 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      Florida judge strikes down DeSantis-backed voting map as unconstitutional

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      A judge in Florida has ruled in favor of voting rights groups that filed a lawsuit against a congressional redistricting map approved by Ron DeSantis in 2022. Voting rights groups had criticized the map for diluting political power in Black communities.In the ruling, Leon county circuit judge J Lee Marsh sent the map back to the Florida legislature to be redrawn in a way that complies with the state’s constitution.“Under the stipulated facts (in the lawsuit), plaintiffs have shown that the enacted plan results in the diminishment of Black voters’ ability to elect their candidate of choice in violation of the Florida constitution,” Marsh wrote in the ruling.The ruling is expected to be appealed by the state, likely putting the case before the Florida supreme court.The lawsuit focused on a north Florida congressional district previously represented by the Democrat Al Lawson, who is Black. Lawson’s district was carved up into districts represented by white Republicans.DeSantis vetoed a map that initially preserved Lawson’s district in 2022, submitting his own map and calling a special legislative session demanding state legislators accept it. Judge Marsh rejected claims from Florida Republicans that the state’s provision against weakening or eliminating minority-dominant districts violated the US constitution.“This is a significant victory in the fight for fair representation for Black Floridians,” said Olivia Mendoza, director of litigation and policy for the National Redistricting Foundation, an affiliate of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, in a statement.“As a result, the current discriminatory map should be replaced with a map that restores the fifth congressional district in a manner that gives Black voters the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.”In 2022, the Florida Legislative Black Caucus labeled the DeSantis-approved congressional map as voter suppression.The map resulted in Florida Republicans picking up four congressional seats in the state, increasing Republican representatives from 16 to 20 out of 28 seats and helping Republicans seal a slim majority in the House in 2022.Prior to the court decision, the state of Florida and voting rights groups that had filed the lawsuit reached an agreement that narrowed the scope of the lawsuit to focus on Lawson’s congressional seat, though there is still a separate lawsuit in federal court over the state’s congressional maps.The court decision is the latest ruling in the south against Republican-drawn congressional maps over concerns the redistricting reduced Black voting power.In June, the US supreme court overturned a Republican drawn map in Alabama and shortly after lifted a hold on a case involving redistricting in Louisiana, returning the case to a lower court, increasing the likelihood Louisiana will be required to create a second congressional district that empowers Black voters. More

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      Wisconsin lawsuit urges state to strike down Republican-drawn electoral maps

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      A day after Wisconsin supreme court justice Janet Protasiewicz took office, flipping control of the court to liberals, a coalition of legal groups in Wisconsin has filed suit to challenge the state’s electoral maps. It alleges that the state’s maps are gerrymandered and unconstitutional and aims to correct the partisan advantage Republican lawmakers have maintained in Wisconsin’s electoral maps for more than a decade.The complaint alleges that Wisconsin’s maps deny voters “equal protection and free association” rights and violate Wisconsin’s constitution, which calls for districts to consist of contiguous geographical territory.The lawsuit, filed at the state supreme court, asks the state to redraw the electoral maps for the state senate and assembly before the 2024 elections. The case also requests that state senators not up for reelection face a special election in 2024 after new maps have been drawn.If the court rules that Wisconsin’s maps are unconstitutional, Law Forward, a left-leaning law firm and one of the groups filing the lawsuit, “would be willing” to propose new maps, said Jeff Mandell, the group’s founder.States are tasked with redrawing their electoral maps every 10 years. In Wisconsin, the state legislature is responsible for drawing the legislative lines that shape political control of the state.In 2011, Republican lawmakers gathered behind the closed doors of a Madison law firm across the street from the state capitol, redrawing the state’s electoral maps and shifting millions of voters into new districts. The resulting maps, which were quickly signed into law by the former Republican governor Scott Walker, nearly guaranteed Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.“In 2011, the legislature engaged in the most extreme version of gerrymandering that we possibly have ever seen,” said Mark Gaber, who manages redistricting litigation with Campaign Legal Center, one of the organizations signing onto the complaint. “The 2011 Republican legislature ensured that Wisconsin voters would never be able to change their minds.”A decade later, on 15 April 2022, the Wisconsin supreme court ruled in a 4-3 decision to adopt Republican lawmakers’ new maps, which further entrenched the party’s advantage in the state.In statewide contests, Wisconsin elections are typically competitive – the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, won the 2018 gubernatorial election by 1.1 percentage points, and was re-elected in 2022 by 3.4 percentage points. Presidential contests have been decided by similarly narrow margins in the last decade. In the state assembly and senate, though, Republicans have maintained large majorities since 2011. Currently, Republicans hold a majority in the assembly and a supermajority in the state senate.The legal groups filed the lawsuit on behalf of 19 voters, among them Denise Sweet, an Anishinaabe poet and Native Vote Manager with Wisconsin Conservation Voters, and Rebecca Clarke, a county supervisor from Sheboygan county. They argue that Wisconsin’s maps deprive their communities and constituencies of representation in the state legislature.In a statement, Evers called the complaint “great news for our democracy and for the people of our state whose demands for fair maps and a nonpartisan redistricting process have gone repeatedly ignored by their legislators for years”.Protasiewicz, who was sworn in to the supreme court on Tuesday after winning a closely watched election on 4 April, has criticized Wisconsin’s legislative maps as unfair and campaigned on the issue. In an interview with the Capital Times, the Madison newspaper, Protasiewicz said she “would enjoy taking a fresh look at the gerrymandering question”.This complaint is the first major voting rights case for Wisconsin’s new liberal majority on supreme court, which could decide more elections-related cases ahead of the 2024 elections.Wisconsin voters have tried to challenge the state’s gerrymander in the federal courts in the past. In a 2018 case brought by 12 Wisconsin voters, the US supreme court ruled that the court could not weigh in on the plaintiff’s claim that the entire map was gerrymandered, asking the plaintiffs to return with a case focusing on specific districts. In a separate ruling in 2019, the court ruled that partisan gerrymandering could not be adjudicated by federal courts. More

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      Ron DeSantis sued over bid to restrict voting rights for people with past convictions

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      A voting rights group in Florida filed a lawsuit against the rightwing governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, saying his administration created a maze of bureaucratic and sometimes violent obstacles to discourage formerly incarcerated citizens from exercising their right to vote.Florida voters in 2018 overwhelmingly passed a constitutional referendum, called amendment 4, that lifted the state’s lifetime voting ban for people with felony convictions.Yet what ensued in the years since 2018 was an aggressive campaign, led by DeSantis, to sow confusion and fear among formerly incarcerated people. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), which championed amendment 4, said state officials have continued to disenfranchise 1.4 million Florida residents – roughly a quarter of the state’s eligible Black voters.“Who is the public supposed to rely on to determine voter eligibility?” said the FRRC’s executive director, Desmond Meade. “We’re saying that it is the responsibility of the state. The law says it is the responsibility of the state.”DeSantis appears to disagree. The lawsuit, resubmitted on Friday by the FRRC, comes a year after the Florida governor ordered the arrests of dozens of people who participated in the 2020 election, including people who had been issued voter registration cards from the Florida department of state.“If the state dropped the ball by incorrectly verifying these people’s eligibility to vote, before you take someone’s liberty, they should fix their broken system,” Meade said.In 2019, Florida lawmakers passed a controversial bill requiring people with felony convictions to repay all outstanding debts before having their voting rights restored under amendment 4. But the state has no centralized database that records how much each individual person owes in court fines. Each county clerk’s office has a different method of calculating the amount of money that a formerly incarcerated person owes the state, complicating the process of paying off fines.“So you’re telling people that you have to pay your debt before you’re able to vote,” said Meade. “But there’s no guarantee that the state could even tell them exactly what they owe?”The lawsuit said this system, in which local and state election officials cannot be trusted to dole out accurate information about voter eligibility, is part of an intentional, state-sponsored campaign to dismantle amendment 4.“This is not simply the result of administrative failures or bureaucratic ineptitude,” the complaint reads.According to documents shared with the Guardian, the FRRC repeatedly contacted the state election officials between 2018 and today, offering potential solutions to streamline the process of registering voters.When the Florida department of state declined to hire additional staff to tackle a mounting backlog of voter registration applications from formerly incarcerated people, the FRRC offered to shoulder the costs. The advocacy group could identify and reach out to people whose court fines had been paid, easing the state officials’ workload.The state’s response has been lukewarm. Efforts to establish a public-private partnership have been slow to advance over five years.“We’ve had three different secretaries of state since the passage of amendment 4, each with different staff,“ said the FRRC deputy director, Neil Volz. “We still have not seen this become a priority.”Natalie Meiner, a spokeswoman for the Florida department of state, said: “The department does not comment on pending litigation.”The FRRC said it was still in talks with the state department.“We just want the state to do its job,” said Volz.The lawsuit is a last-ditch attempt to make accurate voter registration a priority for elected officials. But they worry that, without court intervention, state officials will keep amendment 4 in holding pattern, rejecting offers of assistance.Volz wants people who had their voting rights restored under amendment 4 vote in the 2024 presidential election without fear of prosecution. But the memory of last year’s arrests, announced by DeSantis just days before the 2022 primary elections in Florida, is still fresh in the minds of millions of Florida residents.Romona Oliver was driving home from work last August when she saw a group of Florida law enforcement officers in her driveway.“She was upset, and asked what she was being arrested for, and they’re telling her voting fraud,” said her attorney, Mark Rankin.Shortly after taking her case, Rankin learned that Oliver had submitted a voter registration application before the 2020 election. The state approved her application and sent her a voter registration card.“She even went to the DMV at a later date to change her driver’s license because she got married, and the state issued her a second voter registration card in her new name,” said Rankin “So now she’s been basically told twice that she’s eligible to vote.”The government had made a mistake. Oliver was ineligible to vote because she was convicted of second-degree murder in 2000 – amendment 4 does not restore the rights of people convicted of murder or felony sex offense.Prosecutors offered Oliver a plea deal of “no contest” to the charge of voter fraud.The other felony charge against Oliver was dismissed. She agreed to spend time in county jail on the day of her arrest. The court fines were waived.“So basically, you just let her walk away to make it go away,” Rankin said. “But because she pleaded no contest, they were able to have what they wanted, which was a newspaper headline that says, ‘local defendant accepts plea deal,’ which I think is the point of all this.”FRRC leaders said the highly publicized arrests were the final step in a complex scheme of voter intimidation designed by the DeSantis administration.Millions of Florida residents, including the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit, watched as people like Oliver were taken away in handcuffs just days before the 2022 midterm elections in Florida. The videos of arrests were a grim warning of what might happen to individuals who misunderstand the parameters of amendment 4.“Those videos showed me that even if you honestly believe you are able to vote, they can arrest you anyway,” said Rhoshanda Bryant-Jones, one of the four individual plaintiffs in the case.Bryant-Jones was convicted over a decade ago for narcotics-related crimes. Since her release from prison, she recovered from substance abuse issues and created a small business that helps other people battle addiction.“I am not willing to risk my freedom, and all that I have accomplished,” she said. “Even though the day I thought I had my rights restored by amendment 4 was one of the great blessings of my life.”By raising the specter of arrest, DeSantis sent a message to Bryant-Jones and all other Florida residents who might have had their rights restored under amendment 4: don’t bother trying to understand if you’re eligible to vote, the risks are not worth it.Most of the August 2022 arrests follow a similar pattern: voters had assumed that they were eligible to vote because election officials had told them so.If Oliver had rejected the plea deal, prosecutors would need to prove that she somehow knew the government had erred by approving her voter registration application.“But it doesn’t really matter if you ultimately prove that you didn’t violate the law because you had no idea you were ineligible to vote,” said Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center who specializes in restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions.Most of the people who DeSantis targeted, like Oliver, do not have the financial resources to fight a prolonged legal battle, so they opted for a plea deal.“And you have to remember that these are people who have already been through the wringer of the criminal legal system and really, really don’t want to go back to prison,” Bowie said.“This organized push to arrest people who seem to clearly have made good faith mistakes,” Bowie added. “It is something I don’t think we’ve seen at this scale since the end of the civil rights era.” More

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      Revealed: Florida Republicans target voter registration groups with thousands in fines

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      Florida Republicans have hit dozens of voter registration groups with thousands of dollars of fines, the latest salvo in an alarming crackdown on voting in the state led by Governor Ron DeSantis.At least 26 groups have cumulatively racked up more than $100,000 in fines since September of last year, according to a list that was provided by Florida officials to the Guardian. The groups include both for-profit and nonprofit organizations as well as political parties, including the statewide Republican and Democratic parties of Florida.The fines, which range from $50 to tens of thousands of dollars, were levied by the state’s office of election crimes and security, a first-of-its-kind agency created at the behest of DeSantis in 2022 to investigate voter fraud. Voter fraud is extremely rare, and the office has already come under scrutiny for bringing criminal charges against people who appeared to be confused about their voting eligibility.Election watchdogs worry the new policies could have a chilling effect on engaging voters. There has already been a drop in voter registrations this year compared with 2019 – the last full year leading into a presidential election, according to Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida. Through 1 June of this year, 2,430 new registrations had come from third-party voter registration organizations, he said. That’s on pace to be a sharp decrease from the 63,212 new voter registrations third-party groups submitted by the end of 2019.A crackdown on third-party voter registration groups is also likely to disproportionately affect Floridians of color, who are about five times more likely to register with third-party groups than white voters are.“The message is clear, [third-party voter registration organizations] are an endangered species in Florida. And it affects this population disparately,” said Smith, who has been retained by the plaintiffs challenging the voter registration restrictions in federal court.“When you start to ratchet down the ability for groups and their first amendment rights to petition … government by getting people registered to vote, you are going to affect that overall population of registered voters.”A ‘gross misapplication’ of the lawIn mid-May, the non-profit Hispanic Federation received a letter from the office of election crimes and security notifying it that it was being fined $7,500. Fifteen of the applications it collected were submitted to the wrong county – Polk county, in central Florida, when the voters lived elsewhere. Those 15 applications represented a tiny sliver of the more than 16,500 voter registration applications the group collected in 2022 but still resulted in a fine.Through a public records request, the Guardian reviewed several of the applications the Hispanic Federation submitted that were flagged for fines. In nearly all of them, the voter incorrectly wrote on their own applications that they lived in Polk county. In many cases, the address they listed was just over the county line in Osceola county.One voter lived just 300ft from the county line, which cut through his neighborhood. Another lived just 660ft from the county line. At least 10 voters lived within three miles of the county boundary, according to a Guardian analysis.The Hispanic Federation agreed to pay the fine, but wrote a letter to the state saying it “strongly disagreed” with the penalty and called it a “gross misapplication” of the law. The amount of $7,500 could pay the salary of about a dozen canvassers for a week, who could probably register between 350 and 400 people, the group said. The fine essentially meant that mistakes on 15 applications would make it harder to register hundreds of new voters.“Despite our good faith efforts, professionalism, and due diligence, we cannot eliminate some applications from being processed with errors as we have not been given access to an official mechanism to verify the information of each applicant – which is, in any case, not our role,” the group wrote in June.“There is no claim that we intentionally misrepresented, nor is there a claim that we diverted, such registrations from the correct county or that we held on to the registrations beyond the required period in which they were to be delivered.”The Florida department of state, which oversees the office of election crimes and security, did not return a request for comment.Frederick Vélez III Burgos, the Hispanic Federation’s national director of civic engagement, said in an interview that until the recent change in the law, the group would not have been fined. In 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tweaked state law to require groups to turn in voter registration forms to the county where the prospective voter lived (they previously could turn them in anywhere). The lawmakers imposed steep fines for non-compliance – $500 for each form that was turned in at the wrong place.The change came after election officials complained that voter registration groups were bombarding them with applications for people outside their counties. Though the election officials could register voters regardless of where they lived, it created extra work around elections. “What would happen is [the groups] would kind of bomb different counties with a whole bunch of them. So the workload wasn’t fairly distributed,” said Lori Edwards, who serves as the supervisor of elections in Polk county.While that could cause a headache for election officials, Edwards said, “it is not among the worst offenses that third-party voter registration organizations can do.” Far worse, she said, is when groups wait too long to turn in voter registration applications until after the registration deadline, thus disfranchising the voters.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2022, the state legislature raised the maximum amount a group could be fined from $1,000 to $50,000. Earlier this year, it raised the cap again, to $250,000, and shortened the amount of time groups have to turn in the forms after they are filled out from 14 days to 10. Each late application carries a $50 fine. Republicans also banned non-citizens from collecting applications and barred voter registration groups from collecting contact information from people who they register, making it harder to follow up with them later (a federal judge blocked both of these provisions this month).Two groups have accounted for more than $70,000 of the fines. Hard Knocks Strategies LLC – a for-profit election canvassing organization – has been fined $47,600 since last year for turning in forms late and to the wrong county. And Poder Latinx was fined $26,000 for turning in 52 voter registration applications to the wrong county.“We’re a small voter registration organization with a long history of playing by all the rules. We had to pay the penalties in Florida to avoid even costlier litigation, but paid them without admission of wrongdoing,” Hard Knocks Strategies said in a statement.“Are voter registration organizations on the right being targeted as aggressively and frequently in Florida as those seeking to register voters of color and other underrepresented communities? Given Governor DeSantis’ track record, that question may be rhetorical.”‘I would be allowing the system to win’After getting fined, activists in Florida say they are determined not to let the penalties deter them from continuing to sign up voters.Rosemary McCoy, who runs a small non-profit called Harriet Tubman Freedom Fighters, was fined $600 for turning in a dozen applications late. She said her group does quality control on the applications it collects, reviewing the forms to make sure that they are complete and don’t have errors. If there’s a problem it can take a while to track down the applicant.McCoy said she plans to pay the fine, but it’s money that would have otherwise gone to provide stipends or a gas subsidy for volunteers.“That’s a hefty fine,” she said. “The purpose of these fines is to stop us, stop us from registering people … Someone has to get out there and register people and that’s what we do.”Regina Jackson, a Jacksonville pastor, received a notice in May that she was being fined $50 for turning in a voter registration form late. And while she wasn’t fined for it, the letter also said that the application didn’t have a mark noting the group that had collected it and the date printed in triplicate. Jackson said she had inquired about the specific form before she turned it in with the election office and had been advised it was acceptable.Jackson considered stopping registering voters altogether after receiving the letter, but had since reconsidered.“I was like, ‘You know what – I’m not doing this any more,’ she said in May, just after she got the letter. “Then I thought, ‘I would not only be hurting my community but I would be allowing the system to win.’” More

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      North Carolina voting rights ‘still in five-alarm fire’ despite supreme court ruling

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      The US supreme court ruled in favor of North Carolina voting rights groups last week, which celebrated with one breath and with the next condemned the new election laws and political maps being pushed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.“We are still in a five-alarm fire here in North Carolina,” said Gino Nuzzolillo, campaign manager for the state’s Common Cause branch, which was one of the plaintiffs that won in the case the supreme court ruled on.North Carolina Republicans, including Tim Moore, the speaker of the state’s house of representatives whose name is on the case, Moore v Harper, had asked the supreme court to take up a highly controversial legal theory that would have given him and legislators around the country immense power over setting state-level federal election laws.Even though the high court rejected that theory in a 6-3 vote, preventing a nationwide shift in checks and balances over writing election laws, North Carolina’s Republican legislators can already act largely unchecked by the other branches of state government. They have a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature and the now Republican-controlled state supreme court signaled it would not act as a check on legislative power, including by taking the rare step to reverse two recent decisions by the previously Democrat-controlled court to re-allow partisan gerrymandering and require voter ID.Moore v Harper originated in state court as a partisan gerrymandering case, and as part of that litigation state courts put temporary maps in place for the 2022 elections. In a statement about the supreme court decision, Moore confirmed that the legislature will draw new maps.“We will continue to move forward with the redistricting process later this year,” Moore said.North Carolina is the only state where the governor cannot veto election maps drawn by the legislature, meaning that not even split-party leadership of the executive and legislative branches is a check on gerrymandering.For voting rights groups in North Carolina, this political reality makes the supreme court’s other voting rights decision this term that much more important. In Allen v Milligan, a case out of Alabama, the court rejected arguments from Republicans to do away with another part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This leaves an open lane to sue in federal court to overturn maps that dilute the voting power of racial minorities.Even with the victories in these two cases, federal judicial protections for voting rights are still the weakest they’ve been since at least 2013, when the supreme court crippled the Voting Rights Act. Still, voting rights groups are celebrating these two rulings because they preserve what legal tools are left at the federal level to protect the significant gains in voting access and fair representation since the civil rights era.What’s nextMoore and his Republican colleagues are working on three election bills, which they have enough votes to pass and overturn a likely veto from the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, as long as no Republicans defect.S747 is an omnibus election bill that would make wide-ranging changes to voter access, including requiring all same-day registration voters to cast provisional ballots and changing the deadline for mail ballots.S749 would change the structure and powers of state and county boards of elections, making them deadlocked between parties, rather than having a majority vote favoring the party in control of the governor’s mansion, as it is now.H772 would change rules around poll observers, including the possible criminalization of elections officials who are found to interfere with observers.In the fall, the legislature will turn its attention to redistricting maps for seats in the US House of Representatives. North Carolina is a purple state, currently controlled by a Democratic governor but with a Republican supermajority in the legislature. Under the current map, North Carolina sent seven Democrats and seven Republicans to Congress.The redrawn map this fall will probably look similar to the map Republicans first proposed in 2021, which would likely have given Republicans a 10-4 advantage, according to Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper. He testified as an expert witness for Common Cause in state court that the congressional map, as well as the state map’s counterparts, were partisan gerrymanders.He anticipates that Democratic representatives Jeff Jackson, Kathy Manning and Wiley Nickel will have their districts redrawn to favor Republican candidates.Leaders from Common Cause and the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters, both groups that sued the state and won in the Moore v Harper case, said they oppose all three bills and will oppose redistricting that dilutes the votes of political or minority groups.Public polling by the Associated Press showed that a majority of people in both parties see gerrymandering as a major problem, and research shows it is a key driver of political polarization and protecting politically extreme candidates.Neither Moore nor Ralph Hise, chair of the state senate’s redistricting and elections committee, responded to emailed questions about how the public can participate in legislative action around the election bills or redistricting, about whether the legislature will consider racial data for redistricting or about limiting partisan bias in drawing maps.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2021, North Carolina Republicans wrote rules that they could not consider racial data when drawing political maps. At the time, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), whose attorneys represented Common Cause in the Moore litigation, argued they should have used racial data for fair representation.In light of the Allen v Milligan ruling, the coalition’s senior voting rights lawyer, Hilary Harris Klein, said the legislature will have to consider racial data this time or be in violation of federal law.Using racial data, or not, will be a key point in the development of possible federal litigation to challenge discriminatory maps. Klein stressed that the SCSJ will advocate for equitable maps during the drawing process because the organization does not want to resort to litigation.Weakness of democratic institutionsNorth Carolina Republicans have a long history of passing racially and politically discriminatory voting maps and election laws, according to several federal and state court judgments since 2013.Since 2016, voting rights groups have been able to turn back some of those laws with a Democratic-majority state supreme court. But as of 2022, Republicans control the court, and will at least until 2028.“The state courts are probably a closed avenue to any further vindication of voter’s rights under the state constitution,” Nuzzolillo said.Relying on federal courts has been made increasingly difficult by the US supreme court under its chief justice, John Roberts.“The court in the last 10 years has done extraordinary damage to democratic institutions,” said Carolyn Shapiro, professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. She wrote a brief to the supreme court in the Moore v Harper case supporting the voting rights groups.She points to the 2013 Shelby county decision, in which Roberts wrote the opinion to strike down the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act and allowed states to immediately pass laws aimed at voter suppression. In the Abbott v Perez and Rucho v Common Cause cases from 2018, the court made it harder to win racial gerrymandering cases and impossible to bring political gerrymandering cases in federal courts. Then, in 2021, in Brnovich v DNC, the court made it harder to bring vote denial claims, which are the claims voting rights groups could try to bring against the election laws that North Carolina’s legislature is currently considering.The reason voting rights groups saw this year’s rulings as huge victories was because expectations were so low, Shapiro said.That Moore v Harper and Allen v Milligan were even taken up is an aberration from the historically typical strategy of the supreme court, showing how far the court and political thinking has shifted, according to Rick Su, a law professor at the University of North Carolina.The rulings mainly kept precedent in place rather than adding any rights or protections, Su said. That responsibility would fall to Congress.“We held the line,” Klein said. “In this climate, that is a huge win.” More