U.S. District Judge Mark Walker agreed with voters who sued the state that the bill “runs roughshod over the right to vote, unnecessarily making voting harder for all eligible Floridians, unduly burdening disabled voters, and intentionally targeting minority voters — all to improve the electoral prospects of the party in power.”
Walker said that for the next decade, changes to voting laws that affect third-party registration efforts, drop boxes or “line warming” — in which volunteers offer water or chairs to people waiting in line to vote — must be approved first by the court.
“Florida has repeatedly, recently, and persistently acted to deny Black Floridians access to the franchise,” Walker wrote. “This Court also finds that preclearance would prevent future violations.”
Voting rights activists hailed the ruling as a “landmark decision,” while Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) dismissed it as “performative partisanship.”
“This is a huge victory for voters in this state,” said Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of Equal Ground, one of the groups that sued the state. “It also feels like we are moving the needle forward in expanding access to the ballot box in Florida.”
DeSantis (R) signed the bill, known as SB 90, into law in May, live on Fox News. Although he had touted the state’s elections seven months earlier as flawless, he still pushed changes that critics say would make it harder to vote.
His enthusiasm for changing election laws continued this year, but Thursday’s court ruling means that many of those changes may not be enacted.
At a news conference in West Palm Beach on Thursday, DeSantis said Walker’s ruling “was not unforeseen,” and that it will be reversed on appeal.
“It’s just a matter of how quickly it’s going to get reversed,” he said.
Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls (R) called Walker’s pre-clearance order “an egregious abuse of his power.”
Walker presided over the nonjury trial in Tallahassee for three weeks this year. His 288-page decision issued Thursday included the recounting of several acts of violence against Black voters in Florida in the past, including a massacre of more than 30 Black residents in Ocoee in 1920 on Election Day after a Black voter went to the polls.
“What is this Court to make of this history? To be sure, there are those who suggest that we live in a post-racial society,” Walker wrote. “But that is simply not so. Florida’s painful history remains relevant; it echoes into the present and sets the stage for SB 90.”
Brenda Wright, senior adviser for legal strategies at the think tank Demos, said Walker recognized the “extremely egregious history of racial discrimination in voting” in his ruling.
“He put together the picture of what SB 90 has done to voting rights in the context of Florida’s history of discrimination,” Wright said. “I would hope this would give pause to those who would enact further restrictions on voting rights.”