Voter identification and congressional redistricting stand chief among concerns voiced by advocacy organizations in the state as the 2026 legislative session gets underway.
Members of 11 organizations gathered to respond to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ State of the State address, delivered Tuesday.
Genesis Robinson, director of Equal Ground, a Black-led, nonpartisan group working to build Black political power in the state, called the organizations “united as democracy-defense organizations.”
The groups included Equal Ground, the NAACP, Southern Poverty Law Center, Common Cause Florida, the American Civil Liberties Union, Justice Over Everything, League of Women Voters, Florida Watch, and Black Voters Matter.
“What we heard was a lame duck governor who is singularly focused on control,” Robinson said.
The expanse of his control has been a “power grab,” Robinson said, to establish redrawn congressional maps, “aggressive voter suppression, attacks on local governance, and attempts to erase long-standing protections that exist for our democracy.”
In DeSantis’ address, his last, he recited statistics from his time in office, bragging about illegal immigration enforcement, and made several references to the Founding Fathers.
Johnathan Webber. with the Southern Poverty Law Center, took issue with the governor’s pride the state’s number of state employees per capita — the lowest, or among the lowest, in the nation.
“It tells me that this is a government not meeting the needs of its residents by design, and I’m afraid that it’s only going to get worse when you couple this with the failure of leadership from Congress in Washington, D.C.,” Webber said, pointing to the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Pamela Burch-Fort of the Florida State Conference of NAACP said the people represented by her organization were “totally excluded” from the governor’s address.
Similarly, Jamil Davis Black of Black Voters Matter called DeSantis’ address “absurd and completely out of touch” with at least 4 million residents in Florida, referencing the Black population.
Davis Black, as well as several other speakers, addresssed congressional redistricting, a focus of the governor and the Legislature, with DeSantis calling a special session to address mid-decade redistricting after the regular session ends.
Republicans in several state are pushing mid-decade redistricting to boost GOP representation in Congress.
Jessica Lowe-Minor with the League of Women Voters of Florida said the need to redistrict has been “fabricated” by DeSantis and that she finds it interesting that he did not mention it during his speech.
“Florida residents expect their elected leaders to focus on the kitchen-table issues affecting voters’ daily lives, not diverting millions in taxpayer dollars to a rushed and unconstitutional redistricting process,” Lowe-Minor said.
Voting rightsThe groups took particular issue with HB 991 and SB 1334, companion bills that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship to vote. That measure was introduced by Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka of Fort Myers and Sen. Erin Grall of Vero Beach, both Republicans.
Robinson called the bill “an arbitrary creation of rules to fix a problem that does not exist. This is not election integrity, this is administrative disenfranchisement.”
The advocates urged passage of HB 1419, focused on voter registration, including but not limited to expansion of the available languages on vote-by-mail ballots. The bill is called the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Florida Voting Rights Act, named for the married civil rights activists killed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1951.
Lowe-Minor said she agreed with the part in DeSantis’ speech in which he insisted that deeds are more powerful than words. “I actually found myself agreeing with that statement. … However, here in Florida we are experiencing a very stark difference between the words that are being said by our elected officials and the results that we are experiencing in our lived reality and on the ground.”
In pointing out her grievances with voting rights under DeSantis, Lowe-Minor cited in particular the petition gathering law passed last year. Her organization is in a lawsuit with the state regarding HB 1205, which limited petition gathering efforts for constitutional ballot initiatives.
“Here we are in what should be ‘the Free State of Florida,’ finding ourselves not being able to exercise constitutional rights that were guaranteed as part of our founding documents in the U.S. Constitution,” Lowe Minor said.
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