A Major Victory for Democracy: Court Temporarily Blocks Florida’s Voter Suppression Omnibus Bill

On Monday, a federal judge temporarily blocked provisions of Florida voter suppression law, Senate Bill 7050, which was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in late May. 

“This case arises from Florida’s latest assault on the right to vote,” wrote Chief Judge Mark E. Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida at the onset of the order. Walker, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, also struck down the most harmful provisions of Florida’s 2021 voter suppression law in March 2022.  “[T]he challenged provisions exemplify something Florida has struggled with in recent years; namely, governing within the bounds set by the United States Constitution,” he continued.

Two of the law’s restrictive provisions have been blocked. 

• One bars noncitizen volunteers from conducting voter registration activities on behalf of third-party voter registration organizations (3PVROs) — groups that engage in community-based voter registration. 

• The other blocked provision criminalizes routine retention of voter information for any purpose except voter registration, thus making it a felony to maintain voter information for other activities such as get-out-the-vote efforts.

This resounding voting rights victory stems from two recently filed lawsuits challenging S.B. 7050, one brought by the Florida Conference of the NAACP and the other brought by Hispanic Federation. They allege that the challenged provisions disproportionately target voters of color. 

Ohio’s Congressional Map Is Back Before a Republican-Majority State Supreme Court

Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a case from Ohio Republican legislators invoking the recently rejected radical independent state legislature (ISL) theory. In the order, the nation’s highest court sent the case back to the Ohio Supreme Court for further proceedings.

This order comes almost exactly a year after the last ruling for Ohio legislators to redraw the congressional map ahead of 2024. The deadline to redraw was ignored by the Republicans. 

As a result of this new order, the Ohio Supreme Court can continue to play an indispensable role in reviewing the state’s congressional map to ensure that it complies with the Ohio Constitution as the congressional map is returned to state court. However, the new partisan composition of the Ohio Supreme Court further complicates the road to fair maps.

Despite multiple decisions ruling the maps unconstitutional gerrymanders and several court orders, Ohio Republicans have refused to draw fair maps. In fact, five rounds of map-drawing have taken place since 2020. As a solution, advocates, like Democracy Docket contributor Katy Shanahan, are pushing to remove politicians from the redistricting process entirely. 

U.S. Supreme Court Allows Mississippi’s 1890 Disenfranchisement Scheme To Go Unchecked 

Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Mississippi’s 1890 felony disenfranchisement provision in a missed opportunity to “learn from its mistakes,” as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson expressed in her dissent. When the Jim Crow-era policy provision was drafted at the state’s 1890 constitutional convention, the convention’s president plainly exclaimed, “We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this will answer.” 

In 2017, individuals with prior felony convictions filed a lawsuit challenging Section 241, which strips the right to vote for life from anyone with any of the Section’s enumerated crimes. A decision from the district court in 2019 held that updates from the 1950s and 1960s to the law were ratified “without racial motivation.” For the court, this rinsed any discriminatory taint from the original policy. 

• However, it must be noted that the supposedly cleansing amendments to the disenfranchisement law came at the height of Jim Crow. As the petitioners wrote, “Racial animus in Mississippi did not end with the 1890 convention. It is schoolbook history that the 1950s and 1960s were a notorious period of opposition throughout the south to the advances of the civil rights movement, nowhere more so than in Mississippi.”

The infamous 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed this decision in 2022. Later that year, the plaintiffs appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the Court to reverse the 5th Circuit’s “egregiously wrong” decision and to rule that Section 241 violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

On appeal, the petitioners noted, “African Americans constitute 36% of Mississippi’s voting age population, but 59% of its disenfranchised individuals. African American adults are thus 2.7 times more likely than white adults to have been convicted of a disenfranchising crime.” According to the Sentencing Project, Mississippi disenfranchises nearly 11% of its voting age population, the highest percentage in the country.

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the petition means that Mississippi’s felony disenfranchisement provision remains on the books and comes at a time when other states are grappling with — or perpetuating — their own histories of felony disenfranchisement. Most recently: 

• In Tennessee, the state Supreme Court upheld a disenfranchisement scheme that prohibits certain individuals with out-of-state felony convictions from registering to vote if the individual does not “provide evidence” that they do not owe court fees, restitution or child support. According to the complaint, “Of the estimated disenfranchised population in Tennessee, nearly 174,000 are Black, accounting for more than 21% of the Black voting age population – likely the highest rate of Black disenfranchisement in the United States.”

• In Minnesota, a conservative group, Minnesota Voters Alliance, filed a lawsuit challenging Minnesota's new law that restored voting rights to more than 50,000 people with prior felony convictions. The group argues that the new law violates the state constitution and asks a court to block its enforcement.

Nevada Republicans Challenge New Election Worker Protection Law

Last Thursday, Sigal Chattah — a prominent Nevada Republican with “significant ties” to the conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election — filed a lawsuit on behalf of four Nevadans challenging the state’s recently enacted law designed to protect election officials from intimidation, harassment and election interference. 

Enacted in late May in response to alarmingly high rates of threats to election officials, the Election Worker Protection Law creates new offenses to protect election officials from intimidation and election interference.

The lawsuit alleges that the protections outlined in the bill are too broad and “arbitrary” and therefore violates the First and 14th Amendments. 

The new law states that it is illegal for anyone to “use or threaten or attempt to use any force, intimidation, coercion, violence, restraint or undue influence with the intent to: (a) Interfere with the performance of the duties of any elections official relating to an election; or (b) Retaliate against any elections official for performing duties relating to an election.”

More News

• In Texas, Harris County filed a lawsuit against the state challenging a new law that targets election administration in counties with a population of 3.5 million or greater. Houston's Harris County is the only county with a population that meets the threshold. 

• In a win for Oregon voters last week, a federal judge dismissed a conspiracy-filled lawsuit that sought to dismantle the state's mail-in voting system and prohibit electronic vote tabulators from being used in any election. Republicans who brought the lawsuit have already appealed the decision.

• In New Mexico, the state Supreme Court issued an order permitting New Mexico courts to decide partisan gerrymandering cases. This allows a lawsuit filed by the Republican party to proceed. The plaintiffs argue that the state’s congressional map is a partisan gerrymander that favors Democrats in violation of the New Mexico Constitution.  

• Yesterday, there was a hearing of an appeal in a state-level lawsuit challenging a Mississippi bill that creates a new court with unelected judges in the majority-Black capital of Jackson. The plaintiffs argue that the bill violates voters' constitutional rights.

OPINION: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Supreme Takeover

By Rakim Brooks, a public interest appellate lawyer and the president of Alliance for Justice. As a Democracy Docket contributor, he writes about issues relating to our state and federal courts as well as reforms to our judicial systems. Read more ➡️

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