A group of voting rights organizations are asking the Justice Department not to clear a Florida law which places restrictions on third-party voter registration efforts and shortens the early voting period.
Florida’s HB 1355 institutes a “panoply of burdensome and wholly unnecessary restrictions on the opportunity and ability of individual citizens and grassroots organizations to conduct voter registration drives,” the group wrote to the DOJ.
Parts of Florida are covered by section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires certain states to have changes to their voting process approved by the Justice Department. Claiming the restrictive measures are discriminatory, the groups want the feds to step in.
“The available data indicate that these changes will disproportionately and negatively impact the voting rights of minority citizens in the covered counties,” wrote the group, which consists of The League of Women Voters of Florida, the Brennan Center for Justice, Democracia USA and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
As we told you earlier, the League of Women Voters has killed its long-running voter registration program because of the penalties imposed on third-party groups who don’t turn in new voter registration forms within 48 hours. They say the law puts their volunteers at a “grave disadvantage.”
The letter to the chief of the Voting Section in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is embedded below.
Florida Section 5 Comment Letter - FINAL
Ryan J. Reilly
Ryan J. Reilly is a D.C.-based reporter for TPM. Prior to joining TPM, he worked for a news website covering the Justice Department and was a researcher for Bloomberg News. His email address is ryan(at)talkingpointsmemo.com.
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