The law, passed by the Republican-dominated Legislature and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, made it a crime to continue a longstanding practice of paying petition gatherers based on the number of signatures they collect. Experts have said the changes doubled the cost of getting initiatives on the ballot.
Voting Rights
Candidates Grab Headlines With Name-Calling. But Voters Don’t Like It.
Uncivil messages by politicians have become more and more common in the last decade. Political attacks are now a regular occurrence in an increasingly polarized political environment, encouraging voters to get mad and plan to vote ahead of Election Day in November. But that doesn’t mean these kinds of advertisements and personal attacks actually work.
Nikki Fried Challenges Gov. DeSantis’s ‘Publicity Stunt’ in Vote-Fraud Arrests of 20 Felons
Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services Nikki Fried notes that it is the responsibility of the Division of Elections to screen prospective voters for criminal records, because the county supervisors of election lack access to the necessary state databases.
Flagler County’s Sordid Primary Ends Today With Last Day of In-Person Voting
Today is Election Day, or the final day of voting in what, thanks to a handful of candidates, has been one of the more sordid primaries in Flagler County history. Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Unlike during early voting, you are required to vote at your assigned precinct.
DeSantis Touts Arrests of 0.000001% of Voters for Fraud in 2020
The general election drew 11.145 million voters, the primary drew 3.896 million, for a combined total of 15.041 million votes cast. The 17 arrests means that Florida had an astoundingly low rate of fraud of precisely 0.000001%.
Social Media? No. Blame Cable News for Idiocy Politics.
Roughly 17% of Americans are politically polarized – 8.7% to the left and 8.4% to the right – based on their TV news consumption. That’s three to four times higher than the average percentage of Americans polarized by online or social media sources.
Appeals Court Will Decide Whether You Can Pass Water and Food to People in Line to Vote
Attorneys for the League of Women Voters of Florida, the Black Voters Matter Fund, the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans and other plaintiffs filed a 67-page brief asking the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold a district judge’s ruling that said increased “solicitation” restrictions near polling places violate speech rights.
Flagler’s Vote-By-Mail Total Already Far Exceeds All of 2018’s, With Primary Election 13 Days Away
The Flagler County Supervisor of Elections had tabulated almost 9,000 ballots turned in by mail or at its lone, now ostensibly “monitored” drop-box in Bunnell, exceeding by 1,150 the total number of ballots mailed in during the 2018 primary election cycle, the last off-year election.
Local Elections Officials Are As Non-Partisan As They Come
Have these officials, as some charge now, used their authority to interfere with America’s democratic process? Do local election officials abuse their power? Research shows they do not, and they have not, whether they are Democratic or Republican. Legislators are a different matter.
The Independent State Legislature Doctrine Could Reverse 200 Years of Electoral Progress
In a case to be heard in the coming months, the U.S. Supreme Court could decide that state legislatures have control over congressional elections, including the ability to draw voting districts for partisan political advantage, unconstrained by state law or state constitutions.