Citing communication among Republican state leaders discussing how the law will benefit GOP candidates and harm Democratic politicians, a federal judge struck down key portions of Florida’s SB80, a bill designed to suppress voter turnout.
Election lawyer Marc Elias tweeted the decision in which US District Judge Mark Walker, an Obama appointee, struck down key measures of the bill, saying they irreparably harmed the plaintiffs in the case by preventing them from legally registering to vote and making it unreasonably difficult to cast a ballot.
“The evidence bears that out. In Florida, White Floridians outpace Black Floridians in almost every socioeconomic metric. In Florida, since the end of the Civil War, politicians have attacked the political rights of Black citizens. In Florida, though we have come far, “’he realistic fact is that we still have a long, long way to go,'” Walker wrote in his decision. “For the past 20 years, the majority in the Florida Legislature has attacked the voting rights of its Black constituents. They have done so not as, in the words of Dr. King, ‘vicious racists, with [the] governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification,’ but as part of a cynical effort to suppress turnout among their opponents’ supporters. That, the law does not permit.”