Calling it “Florida’s latest assault on the right to vote,” an Obama-appointed federal judge blocked a new state law championed by Republican Florida Governor and albino Oompa-Loompa Ron DeSantis that would make it more difficult for advocacy groups to register voters.
Politico reports Chief Judge Mark Walker of the Northern District of Florida found many of the provisions in the law were solutions looking for problems. For example, the law banned non-citizens from handling voter registration forms although there have been no reported issues with any non-citizens who may have handled forms in the past. The law also bans the organizations running the voter registration drives from keeping any information from the newly-registered voters, a move intended to handcuff groups trying to get people to the polls. Plus it allowed DeSantis to hide his travel records from public scrutiny.
“When state government power threatens to spread beyond constitutional bounds and reduce individual rights to ashes, the federal judiciary stands as a firewall,” Walker wrote in his opinion. “The free state of Florida [a phrase DeSantis has used frequently in the run-up to his presidential campaign] is simply not free to exceed the bounds of the United States Constitution.”