Two voting advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday, challenging Florida’s new law requiring proof of citizenship to vote.
The law passed the Legislature this year on a near-party-line vote and was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in April. It goes into effect Jan. 1.
The two groups are Black Voters Matter Fund and the League of United Latin American Citizens, represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Democracy Defenders Fund.
“This is a political ploy to determine who wins our elections by picking who votes,” Tianna Mays, legal director for DDF, said in a news release. “This scheme targets Black and Brown communities by erecting barriers to voting for hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, including naturalized citizens and other Floridians who don’t have a passport.”
HB 991 appeals to the same sentiment as the federal SAVE Act, which has passed the U.S. House but not the Senate.
“Florida lawmakers are reviving a bill that couldn’t survive Congress and dressing it up as state law,” said Matletha Bennette, senior staff attorney for the SPLC. “This purposely manufactures a crisis for people who have done nothing wrong, and it does so on the backs of naturalized citizens, Black families, and working Floridians.”
A group of voting rights advocates filed suit against the law in federal court minutes after the bill was signed. That suit is is scheduled for a trial in late 2027.
The later suit lists Secretary of State Cord Byrd and supervisors of elections in Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, Orange, and Osceola counties.
The groups are asking the court to declare the law in violation of the National Voter Registration Act and the Fourteenth Amendment and permanently enjoin Byrd and the supervisors from implementing or enforcing the provisions the lawsuit challenges.
Those include “conditioning federal voter registration on requirements prohibited by federal law, removing registered voters on unauthorized grounds or without constitutionally adequate procedures, conducting nonuniform or discriminatory list maintenance, or conducting systematic voter removal activities during the 90 days preceding a federal primary or general election.”
Proving citizenship
In 2020, Floridians voted in favor of a state constitutional amendment that allows only U.S. citizens to vote in state elections.
The new law requires all voting to be done on paper. Voters would show their status with a driver’s license, and the law removes student IDs as acceptable for voting purposes.
The suit bemoans that voter registration will be conditioned on the “state’s ability to independently verify citizenship through government records.”
“Naturalized citizens are particularly vulnerable because government records may reflect their prior noncitizen status while failing to reflect their subsequent naturalization,” the suit claims.
“H.B. 991 likewise permits eligible applicants who timely submit valid registration applications to remain unverified and unable to cast a regular ballot. The consequence of incomplete, outdated, or inconclusive government records thus falls on the eligible citizen rather than the State.”
Black Voters Matter, which works to encourage people to vote, says the law “frustrates BVM’s ability to carry out its existing programs and forces BVM to expend resources it would not otherwise expend.”
The law requires a voter to prove citizenship by providing, among other things, a birth certificate, passport, driver’s license that indicates citizenship, or an order from a federal court granting citizenship.
Obtaining the most common forms of identification “can impose meaningful costs” in time and money, the suit argues, noting the cost to obtain a passport ($130 to renew and $165 for a first-time issuance).
A birth certificate may be less expensive to obtain, the suit acknowledges, “but obtaining one still requires navigating the vital-records system of the jurisdiction in which the voter was born.“
During a debate on the Senate floor, Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, cited statistics from the state showing that in January 20.6 million people in Florida held REAL-ID-compliant driver’s licenses and 872,408 did not.
The legislation was sponsored by Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, who has since been appointed by the governor as Lee County’s supervisor of elections.
“I sign it, they sue us,” DeSantis said while signing the bill. “They go to a liberal judge. The liberal judge sides with them. Then we appeal, and then we win. So, that’s probably what will happen on this — I’ve just seen it enough.”
During the Legislature’s consideration of the legislation, Democratic Rep. Ashley Gantt shared the story of her aunt, who was born in the Jim Crow era and not issued a birth certificate.
“The burden of locating and replacing citizenship documents also carries a history that cannot be separated from race,” the suit notes. “Rep. Gantt explained that the problem was not hypothetical for Black families whose births occurred during the Jim Crow era, when access to hospitals and formal systems of birth documentation was not equal.”
The suit cites a U.S. Department of Homeland Security report that shows Florida had the second highest population of newly naturalized residents during 2024, at 93,240 new citizens.
“The Florida SAVE Act upholds the Florida Constitution by ensuring only citizens can vote in Florida elections,” Byrd said in a news release after it became law.
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