The Florida House Redistricting select committee met for the second time Wednesday.

Conversations around the effort continue to be centered on President Donald Trump pushing Republicans across the country to redraw congressional maps ahead of the midterms. But it’s against Florida’s constitution to create maps for partisan reasons.

Orlando Democratic Representative Bruce Antone asked a redistricting expert presenting to the committee about those perceptions.
“There’s been some statements made that if we redraw districts, they are intended to favor a particular party. What are your thoughts on that, as we talk about the potential for redistricting this time around?” he asked.
The chair of the committee, Republican Representative Mike Redondo, shut that question down.

“We’re talking about statements by unknown folks and hypotheticals. Let’s try and keep it to the presentation if we can, terms of questions,” he said.

The committee has also not allowed public comment so far in either meeting. Abdelilah Skhir, a policy strategist with the ACLU of Florida, said that’s unusual.

The redrawing of states’ congressional districts typically happens only once per decade, following the release of new U.S. Census data. But we’re now up to six states that have enacted new congressional maps for the 2026 midterms; that’s more than in any election cycle not immediately following a census since 1983-84. Even more are expected to join the fray before voters head to the polls next year. Ultimately, more than a third of districts nationwide could be redrawn, threatening to confuse and disenfranchise voters. 

The truly unusual thing, though, is that four of those states passed new maps totally voluntarily. Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina all redrew their districts after President Donald Trump urged them to create more safe seats for Republicans to help the GOP maintain control of the House of Representatives next year, and California did so in order to push back against Trump and create more safe seats for Democrats. (The other two states redrew for more anodyne reasons: Utah’s old map was thrown out in court, and Ohio’s was always set to expire after the 2024 election.) To put that in perspective, only two states voluntarily redistricted in total in the 52 years from 1973 to 2024, according to the Pew Research Center.

So the current “redistricting wars” are truly unprecedented in modern politics — and that’s had some chaotic consequences. In Texas, for instance, voter advocacy groups sued over the new map, arguing that it discriminated against Black and Latino voters. They scored a temporary win on Nov. 18 when a panel of federal judges struck down the new map and reinstated the old one. That ruling, though, came less than three weeks before Texas’ Dec. 8 filing deadline, sending candidates and election officials scrambling to readjust their plans.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida’s Republican-controlled House officially kicked off the first meeting of its select committee on congressional redistricting Thursday, as the state becomes the latest to consider redrawing electoral maps amid a partisan battle for every edge in next year’s midterm elections.

But the prospect of mid-decade redistricting in President Donald Trump’s adopted home state remains uncertain, with the top Republican on the committee stopping short of committing to draft new maps and appearing to draw a deeper divide among his party’s leaders on how the process should move forward. 

Republican state Rep. Mike Redondo, who chairs the committee, cemented his chamber’s commitment to consider redistricting during Florida’s regular session, which runs from Jan. 13 to March 13 — saying it would be “irresponsible” to wait until next spring, as the GOP-controlled state Senate and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis have called for.

“It would be irresponsible to the citizens of Florida,” to delay the process, Redondo said.

The national wave of redistricting efforts was instigated by Trump, who hopes to buck the historical trend of the president’s party losing seats in midterms, and his allies are wagering that Florida could yield three to five more seats for Republicans. Each seat is crucial, because Democrats need a net gain of just three to control the chamber.

Voter rights organizations and representatives of Florida’s minority communities urged Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature to abandon their idea of redrawing congressional districts in response to President Trump’s demand.

The state House’s redistricting committee is set to hold its first meeting Dec. 4. DeSantis this week reiterated his call for lawmakers to recast boundaries, saying a special session this spring might be needed to accomplish the task.

But any effort by GOP leaders to intentionally create more districts crafted to elect Republicans is a clear violation of state law, opponents said at a Dec. 2 news conference in the Capitol.

“Rigging maps (has) no place in a free and fair democratic society,” said Genesis Robinson, executive director of the Equal Ground Education Fund, a voting rights organization. “We do not want politicians choosing their voters.”

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WFLA) — Florida voters and advocates rallied at the capitol hoping to plea with lawmakers in an effort to stop any further action to redraw the state’s congressional maps mid-decade. 

This comes as House members are set to meet for the first time to debate the issue in a matter of days.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has been teasing a possible special session for months now, telling folks to “stay tuned” as everyone awaits Florida’s stake in the redistricting fight. However, there’s a continue push to halt any further plans to redraw congressional maps.

“I think it would be appropriate to do a redistricting here in the mid-decade,” said DeSantis, when asked whether he plans to call a special session on the matter.

DeSantis has been direct with his take on redistricting, saying he even believes Florida deserves extra seats on capitol hill.

Those against any attempt to redraw congressional maps point to the Fair District’s Amendment. Back in 2010, 63% of voters voted to end partisan map drawing, which voting rights groups say is exactly what President Donald Trump is calling for.

The nationwide redistricting arms race is growing increasingly unpredictable. Courts are knocking down maps. Republicans are breaking with President Trump. Democrats are finding new states where they will try to pick up seats.

But there is one constant that will soon define the final contours of the redistricting battle: the calendar.

States have clear filing deadlines for candidates to get on the ballot for primary elections. Legislatures have the ability to change both these deadlines and the dates of the primaries — many did in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. If state legislators decided to take the highly partisan route of a mid-decade gerrymander instead of waiting for the regular assessment that happens every 10 years, they would probably be more than willing to also pass a law moving the dates and deadlines before a planned redistricting session.

But once these deadlines have passed, they are very difficult to undo; there is little known modern precedent for a legislature to throw out already cast votes in a primary election because an opportunity to draw a more partisan map has arisen. And creating a new filing deadline for candidates could cause significant confusion, invite litigation and overburden already overworked and underfunded election officials.

A state appeals court has overturned the conviction of Nathan Hart, one of the first Floridians arrested by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ election police unit in 2022, ruling that state prosecutors never had proper authority for the case.

The Second District Court of Appeal found that the Office of Statewide Prosecution (OSP) lacked jurisdiction to charge Hart because his alleged crimes occurred only in Hillsborough County, not across multiple judicial circuits as the law required at the time. Judges reversed his conviction for falsely affirming that he was eligible to vote during the 2020 presidential election and ordered the case dismissed.

Hart, of Gibsonton, was among 19 people arrested in 2022 during a sweep that DeSantis touted as a crackdown on voter fraud. The arrests followed creation of the Office of Election Crimes and Security, which was established following claims by President Donald Trump and other Republicans that widespread voter fraud marred the 2020 election.

Hart was among defendants who registered to vote after Florida voters approved a 2018 constitutional amendment automatically restoring voting rights for many felons who had completed their sentences. The amendment, however, excluded people convicted of murder or sexual offenses.

Like many others across the nation, people gathered outside the Duval County Courthouse in Jacksonville, Fla., on Oct. 18, 2025, to send a message: No Kings. People played music and danced. Kids found space to throw a football. People ran into old friends. 

“What really stood out to me was how much fun it was. I mean, people were enjoying themselves. You had people in frog costumes and other things. You had some pretty funny signs,” says Larry Hannan, communications and policy director for State Voices Florida, who attended the No Kings rally outside the courthouse in Jacksonville. 

Hannan, who also attended the first iteration of No Kings back in June, estimated a 50 percent increase in attendance. Jacksonville’s protest mirrored other mobilizations across the country. On Sept. 18, it’s estimated that 7 million people turned out at 2,700 No Kings events. 

The protests come in response to the Trump administration’s increasingly authoritarian actions as Trump approaches the end of his first year in office. During his first 10 months back in the White House, Trump has weaponized federal agencies against the American people.

Like many others across the nation, people gathered outside the Duval County Courthouse in Jacksonville, Fla., on Oct. 18, 2025, to send a message: No Kings. People played music and danced. Kids found space to throw a football. People ran into old friends. 

“What really stood out to me was how much fun it was. I mean, people were enjoying themselves. You had people in frog costumes and other things. You had some pretty funny signs,” says Larry Hannan, communications and policy director for State Voices Florida, who attended the No Kings rally outside the courthouse in Jacksonville. 

Hannan, who also attended the first iteration of No Kings back in June, estimated a 50 percent increase in attendance. Jacksonville’s protest mirrored other mobilizations across the country. On Sept. 18, it’s estimated that 7 million people turned out at 2,700 No Kings events. 

The protests come in response to the Trump administration’s increasingly authoritarian actions as Trump approaches the end of his first year in office. During his first 10 months back in the White House, Trump has weaponized federal agencies against the American people.

Petition groups that planned to have their ballot proposals ready for the 2026 election often plan to have enough signatures by November to meet Florida’s procedural deadlines.

But as of now, it’s not known if any group will get there.

Of the various groups backing 20 different proposed amendments to the state’s constitution next year, the one with the closest numbers to the state’s requirements is Smart and Safe Florida, which wants Florida adults 21 and older to be able to possess, purchase or use marijuana.

Throughout the year, petition groups have told the USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida that the goal was to meet Florida’s signature requirements by November, to give time for county supervisors of elections to verify and tally signatures under deadlines set by Florida law.

So far, Smart and Safe Florida has met one required preliminary threshold of 220,016 signatures, which should – among other things – trigger judicial review by the Florida Supreme Court. Its justices must find that the amendment deals with one subject and that its ballot title and summary are clear and unambiguous.

But on Oct. 31, the group filed a lawsuit against Florida’s secretary of state, alleging he was violating state-mandated procedures and effectively blocking the proposed amendment. Since the group met the threshold that typically triggers the secretary of state to transmit the petition to the attorney general’s office. That hasn’t happened, so they’re requesting the Florida Supreme Court gets involved.

DENVER (AP) — After months of extraordinary steps to ensure his party maintains control of the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterms, President Donald Trump is turning his sights toward the voting process in Tuesday’s elections.

That pivot is raising alarm among Democrats and others who warn that he may be testing strategies his administration could use to interfere with elections in 2026 and beyond.

Late last week, Trump’s Department of Justice announced it was sending election monitors to observe voting in one county in New Jersey, which features a race for governor that Republican Trump has become deeply invested in, and to five counties in California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing a ballot measure to counter the president’s own effort to rejigger the congressional map to elect more Republicans.

That announcement was followed with a pre-emptive attack by Trump on the legitimacy of California’s elections. The post on his own social media platform echoed the baseless allegations he made about the 2020 presidential election before he and his allies tried to overturn his loss in a campaign that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV/Gray Florida Capital Bureau) – Mid-decade congressional redistricting efforts are moving forward across the country as Republican states consider redrawing district lines to protect party control in Washington.

Florida lawmakers are among those expected to pursue redistricting changes, despite opposition from voting rights groups who say the move would erode public trust in the electoral process.

“It is something that erodes public trust,” said Jacquelyn Steele of Equal Ground, a voting advocacy organization.

Voting advocates urged Tallahassee area lawmakers on Monday to keep the state’s congressional map unchanged. Steele said there is no legitimate need for redistricting in Florida.

“There really isn’t a need. The need is coming from Washington, trying to keep control in one party,” Steele said.

U.S. House districts are typically redrawn once a decade, immediately after each census. With a narrow majority, President Donald Trump is pushing states to redraw boundaries to protect Republican control. The effort is gaining support in Republican states, including Florida.

Republicans currently hold 20 of the state’s 28 congressional seats. Governor Ron DeSantis announced his support for a new census to force Florida’s redistricting in August.

A Sarasota resident says it’s unfair that political independents are shut out of Primaries.

Among the dozens of petitions the U.S. Supreme Court rejectedthis week was one from a Sarasota resident who challenged Florida’s closed Primary system.

Michael J. Polelle is a former lawyer and emeritus professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law. An independent voter, he was upset after moving to Sarasota in 2012 and learning that as a no-party voter, he was shut out of County Commission Primaries because of the state’s closed system.

Florida is one of a minority of states with closed Primaries. That system locks out the nearly 3.4 million Floridians registered as no-party voters, as well as 443,000 more who are registered with a minor political party — more than 28% of the electorate.

In a phone interview this week, Polelle, 87, told the Phoenix that while he was bothered by not being able to vote in the Primaries in 2012, he wasn’t willing to do anything about it at the time. But he said his feelings changed after the 2016 election, when he realized how “fragile” the election system was, and how it gravitates towards polarization.

“But then what really struck me is that I never realized that my real estate taxes go to pay for these Primaries that I can’t vote in. And that makes no sense to me,” he said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — For decades, the faces of American politics have grown more diverse by nearly every measure, especially as racial minority communities gained political representation after longtime legal disenfranchisement and violent discrimination.

But after some Supreme Court justices expressed skepticism about a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark law that civil rights leaders credit with enabling pluralistic democracy in the U.S., Black lawmakers, civic leaders and organizers fear that the faces of the nation’s elected representatives may soon return to a time before hard-fought civil rights gains.

Justices on Wednesday heard oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that scrutinizes whether Section 2, a part of the Voting Rights Act that bars discrimination in voting systems, is constitutional.

Rep. Cleo Fields, who represents the Louisiana congressional district at the heart of the case, sat in the courtroom as the justices questioned attorneys on both sides of the case. He said he hopes the scope of the ruling’s impact would give justices pause about whether to gut the law.

The Supreme Court appeared poised today to weaken a key provision of a landmark civil rights law by limiting the ability of lawmakers to use race as a factor in drawing voting maps.

At the heart of the case is a debate over whether Louisiana violated the Constitution when it adopted a new electoral map in 2024, creating the state’s second majority-Black district. The plaintiffs challenged Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which allowed race to be used as a factor in creating electoral maps in an attempt to undo generations of efforts to suppress the power of Black voters.

During today’s oral argument, several of the court’s conservative justices appeared focused on whether there should be a time limit to using race as a factor in creating electoral maps. The court may rule that the Voting Rights Act, in seeking to protect minority voters, violates the 14th Amendment, which forbids the government to make distinctions based on race.

If the justices determine that lawmakers cannot consider race when drawing districts, the consequences could be sweeping. Republican state legislatures could use the ruling to eliminate around a dozen Democratic-held House districts across the South, according to a Times analysis, enough to make Republicans favored to win the chamber even if they lost the popular vote by a wide margin.

Democratic voting rights groups are preparing for a nightmare scenario if the Supreme Court guts a key part of the landmark civil rights-era legislation, the Voting Rights Act — a very real possibility this term.

Ahead of the court’s Oct. 15 rehearing of Louisiana v. Callais — a case that has major implications for the VRA — two voting rights groups are sounding the alarm, warning that eliminating Section 2, a provision that prohibits racial gerrymandering when it dilutes minority voting power, would let Republicans redraw up to 19 House seats to favor the party and crush minority representation in Congress.

That calculation, made in a new report from Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund shared exclusively with POLITICO, would all but guarantee Republican control of Congress.

While a ruling in time for next year’s midterms is unlikely, the organizations behind the report said that it’s not out of the question. Taken together, the groups identified 27 total seats that Republicans could redistrict in their favor ahead of the midterms — 19 of which stem from Section 2 being overturned.

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — U.S. government lawyers say that detainees at the immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz” likely include people who have never been in removal proceedings, which is a direct contradiction to what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been saying since it opened in July.

Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice made that admission Thursday in a court filing arguing that the detainees at the facility in the Everglades wilderness don’t have enough in common to be certified as a class in a lawsuit over whether they’re getting proper access to attorneys.

A removal proceeding is a legal process initiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to determine if someone should be deported from the United States.

The DOJ attorneys wrote that the detainees at the Everglades facility have too many different immigration statuses to be considered a class.

The Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Tampa voter against Gov. Ron DeSantis over his failure to call a Special Election for Senate District 14.

The Hillsborough County-based seat is open after DeSantis appointed former Sen. Jay Collins as Lieutenant Governor on Aug. 12. A month and a half later, a Special Election to replace him has still not been called.

The suit seeks to compel DeSantis to schedule one.

“Tampa deserves full representation in the Legislature. By refusing to call a special election, the governor is denying us that right and ignoring decades of established precedent. It’s illegal and wrong,” said Cort Lippe, the Tampa resident behind the legal complaint.

The lawsuit argues DeSantis’ inaction leaves constituents in SD 14 without representation at a particularly inopportune time — lawmakers are set to begin committee weeks Oct. 6 ahead of the 2026 Legislative Session, which begins Jan. 13.

President Donald Trump signed a memorandum Thursday directing the federal government to investigate and dismantle “domestic terrorism networks.”

The move appears targeted at  left-leaning progressive nonprofit groups, which Trump days ago vowed to dismantle, falsely claiming they fund and support political violence and terrorism in the U.S.

The memo directs the FBI’s National Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to go after “anti-fascist”  movements in the U.S.

“This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties,” the memo reads.

Trump signed the memo shortly after the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice directed several U.S. attorneys offices across the country to open investigations into the Open Society Foundations, a progressive grant network founded by Democratic megadonor George Soros.

For decades, the Department of Justice (DOJ) relied on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) to foil and forestall attempts to discriminate against minority voters. 

On Wednesday, the DOJ filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to devastate and vitiate much of what’s left of the landmark civil rights legislation.  

When courts have ordered racially gerrymandered maps redrawn for violating Section 2 of the VRA, “they have compelled States to violate the Constitution to remedy phantom statutory violations,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued for the DOJ in an amicus brief filed in Louisiana v. Callais. 

The lawsuit could deliver a deathblow to the VRA, which was significantly weakened by 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder. In Shelby, the Supreme Court struck down the law’s requirement for jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination — mostly in the South — to get all voting changes approved, or “pre-cleared,” by the federal government. 

Under then-President Joe Biden, the DOJ filed an amicus in December 2024, as Callais was first pending before the Supreme Court, which defended the new electoral map Louisiana had adopted in response to successful VRA challenge. But after President Donald Trump took office, the government withdrew the brief.

Only state and local election officials will provide voter registration services at naturalization ceremonies, under new guidance from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services facilities,

The announcement has sparked strong reactions from voting rights and immigrant advocacy groups.

“It’s an additional attack to third party voter registration organizations from doing the good work of helping the community stay informed and have opportunities to engage in democracy,” said Teresa Guzman Pagan, expanding democracy director of Florida Rising, a voting rights and grassroots organizing group.

The policy prohibits the involvement of nonprofits and community organizations “to keep the process nonpartisan,” while still giving new citizens “full access to registration materials and information through official channels.”

The agency highlighted in their policy alert, published in late August, that the use of nongovernmental organizations was “sporadic” and “varied based upon the location.”

For the hundreds of men who were detained at Alligator Alcatraz, entering the gates of the makeshift migrant detention center in the Everglades meant exiting the labyrinthine but familiar federal immigration process and entering what several immigration attorneys described as an alternate system where the normal rules don’t apply.

One Guatemalan man detained at the tent site was accidentally deported to Guatemala before a scheduled bond hearing, his attorney said, reminiscent of the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

A 35-year-old Cuban man could not be located at the California detention facility where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they had sent him, leaving his family and attorney frantically trying to determine where he was for more than a week, they said.

As of the end of August, the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined by the Miami Herald. The Herald had obtained the names from two detainee rosters.

Around 800 detainees showed no record on ICE’s online database. More than 450 listed no location and only instructed the user to “Call ICE for details” — a vague notation that attorneys said could mean that a detainee is still being processed, in the middle of a transfer between two sites or about to be deported.

Florida leaders are calling for unprecedented mid-decade redistricting.

Changing the congressional map usually happens just once a decade after the U.S. Census. 

But, after Texas redid its map to send more Republicans to Congress at President Donald Trump’s urging, other states are now following suit in a political battle to tilt the balance of power ahead of the 2026 midterms.

But data released this week indicates most Floridians disagree with mid-decade changes.

That includes 45% of Republicans, 60% of independents and 62% of Democrats, according to a poll commissioned by the advocacy group Common Cause.

“Floridians do not want the Legislature to waste our taxpayer dollars and their time trying to make our voting maps even more gerrymandered than they already are,” said Amy Keith, who leads the Florida chapter of the group, in a virtual press conference on Thursday. “Floridians want our Legislature to focus on making our state a more affordable place to live.”

Efforts to redraw congressional maps in Texas and beyond are setting off a flurry of litigation as Republicans and Democrats look to add pickup opportunities in the House ahead of 2026. 

Several groups have filed lawsuits against Texas’s congressional maps, which seek to put five more seats in play for Republicans heading into next year’s midterms, arguing the map is unconstitutional and violates the Voting Rights Act. 

But pending litigation in several other states, including Louisiana and North Dakota, could have major ramifications for the Voting Rights Act and who’s allowed to bring those lawsuits in the first place — decisions that could have consequences for future maps down the line. 

Here’s a look at five legal redistricting battles to watch: 

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley. The 2026 midterms are a little over a year away, but questions about election integrity are already front and center. Just this week, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department is quietly working to build a national voter roll by collecting sensitive voter data from states, a move experts warn could be used to revive false claims of widespread fraud and undermine confidence in future elections.

And recently, President Trump has openly proposed using executive power to ban both mail-in ballots and electronic voting machines. My guest today, law scholar Richard Hasen, has warned in a recent op-ed that an order like that would not only be against the law, it would wield, as he writes, the machinery of government to sow doubt, undermine trust and tilt the election playing field.

Those warnings echo a broader wave of concern. Earlier this week, Mother Jones also published a report on what it’s calling Project 2026, a coordinated effort by Trump and his allies to rewrite voting rules, redraw congressional maps and pressure state and federal officials who are responsible for overseeing elections. It all raises a profound question – are our democratic institutions strong enough to withstand that kind of strain?

Lawmakers will be back in Tallahassee next month to convene committee hearings. Among those committees will be the new House Select committee on Congressional Redistricting.

Rep. Mike Redondo, a Republican first elected in 2023 to represent part of Miami-Dade County, will chair the 11-person committee.

House Speaker Daniel Perez, a Republican, announced last month that the committee would convene. The Senate lacks a similar panel.

“Exploring” questions related to redistricting, Perez said last month, “would potentially allow us to seek legal guidance from our Supreme Court without the uncertainty associated with deferring those questions until after the next decennial census and reapportionment.”

A spokesperson for Senate President Ben Albritton, a Republican, told the Phoenix Tuesday that the Senate had no updates about whether the Senate would convene a committee on congressional redistricting.

Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez has appointed state representatives to a redistricting committee to study and complete an historic mid-decade redrawing of Congressional maps.

It’s a move prompted by President Donald Trump, who wants to ensure Republican control of the House.

That could mean the local seats held by Democrats Maxwell Frost and Darren Soto could be targeted for changes that might make it more challenging for them to retain those seats.

When Republican leaders redrew congressional maps in 2022, that turned a 16-11 GOP advantage in Florida to an even bigger one, 20-8. The governor believes another round of redistricting could give republicans 2-3 more seats in Congress.

“There will be major court battles. You already have some groups saying that they are going to sue no matter what the maps look like,” said University of South Florida political expert Susan MacManus during an interview with WESH 2.

The Justice Department is compiling the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected, buttressing an effort by President Trump and his supporters to try to prove long-running, unsubstantiated claims that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally, according to people familiar with the matter.

The effort to essentially establish a national voting database, involving more than 30 states, has elicited serious concerns among voting rights experts because it is led by allies of the president, who as recently as this January refused to acknowledge Joseph R. Biden Jr. fairly won the 2020 election. It has also raised worries that those same officials could use the data to revive lies of a stolen election, or try to discredit future election results.

The initiative has proceeded along two tracks, one at the Justice Department’s civil rights division and another at its criminal division, seeking data about individual voters across the country, including names and addresses, in a move that experts say may violate the law. It is a significant break from decades of practice by Republican and Democratic administrations, which believed that doing so was federal overreach and ripe for abuse.

“Nobody has ever done anything like this,” said Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Marymount University’s law school and a former Justice Department official.

Dear Mayor Deegan, Sheriff Waters, & Chief Administrative Officer Bowling,

As voting rights organizations, we respectfully request that the City of Jacksonville provide free parking within one block of the Duval County Supervisor of Elections Office during early voting and on election day for all future elections. We propose making parking free along East Monroe Street and East Duval Street between Ocean Street and Newnan Street, and ideally expanding to North Laura Street through North Market Street.

Covering the surrounding parking meters near this key voting location with “Voter Parking Only” during early voting and on election day will directly improve voter access and confidence in our local elections. The downtown Supervisor of Elections Office is not only a centrally recognized hub for voting, but it’s also the go-to location for voters who are unsure of their polling site, need to resolve issues, prefer to drop off their vote-by-mail ballot, or are seeking to cast a provisional ballot. Additionally, this downtown office is where many of our organizations bring community members during ‘Souls to the Polls’ and other civic engagement events. 

Providing free parking for voters is a good practice that other cities in Florida already offer. As you can see in the included photo below, the City of Saint Petersburg offers free parking for its downtown Supervisor of Elections office by covering its parking meters with red sleeves during early voting and on election day.

The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to decide if citizens can still enforce the Voting Rights Act, after a federal appeals court ruled that only the government — not private citizens — can sue to enforce protections against racial discrimination in voting.

In a petition filed Tuesday, Native American voters and tribes urged the justices to overturn an Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that stripped voters and organizations of the ability to bring cases under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the law’s core protection against racially discriminatory voting laws.

“Section 2 is, and always has been, enforced primarily by private litigants,” the petition argues. “Congress enacted the VRA to enforce the rights-creating guarantees of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and crafted Section 2 in explicitly rights-creating terms.”

The case stems from North Dakota’s 2021 redistricting plan, which “cracked” Native communities into multiple districts, diluting their voting power. A federal district court struck down the map under Section 2, but the appeals court reversed — not on the facts, but on the grounds that private plaintiffs cannot enforce Section 2 at all.

Aug 30 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he will issue an executive order to require voter identification from every voter.

“Voter I.D. Must Be Part of Every Single Vote. NO EXCEPTIONS! I Will Be Doing An Executive Order To That End!!!,” Trump said on Truth Social.

“Also, No Mail-In Voting, Except For Those That Are Very Ill, And The Far Away Military,” he added.

Trump has long questioned the U.S. electoral system and continues to falsely claim that his 2020 loss to Democratic President Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud. The president and his Republican allies also have made baseless claims about widespread voting by non-citizens, which is illegal and rarely occurs.

For years, he has also called for the end of electronic voting machines, pushing instead for the use of paper ballots and hand counts – a process that election officials say is time-consuming, costly and far less accurate than machine counting.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WFLA) — As Governor Ron DeSantis and Attorney General James Uthmeier fight for a mid-decade census in the ongoing redistricting battle, could districts in the Tampa Bay area be targeted?

Political analyst, Tara Newsom says there are a number of seats Republicans have their eyes on flipping, one of them being U.S. Representative Kathy Castor’s 14th congressional district, but Governor DeSantis is also drawing attention to other areas like South Florida.

“North of I-4, I think, is a pretty sound map. I don’t think there’s any basis, I think when you get into central, but particularly southeast Florida, there starts to become questions,” said Governor DeSantis.

Florida currently has 28 congressional seats, 20 of them occupied by Republicans. And as Texas and California deal with redistricting showdowns, could Florida be next?

“Can Republicans really cobble together more congressional districts than the 20 that they already hold in the state of Florida, and that’s where I think going after Tampa Bay is a real issue because we’re just too moderate, too centrist, and there’re too many Democrats and moderate Republicans that live in this area,” said Newsom.

Gov. Ron DeSantis will have multiple opportunities over the next eight months to call a special legislative session so the boundaries of Florida’s congressional districts can be redrawn.

It appears the Republican governor has his eye on one of Palm Beach County’s congressional seats — the District 20 spot held by U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Democrat. During remarks on Aug. 20 at Palm Beach State College near Lake Worth Beach, DeSantis mocked the shape of the district, which was crafted after the 1990 Census to increase the chances that a Black candidate could win there.

“It’s the most irregularly shaped district on Florida’s map,” DeSantis said of District 20, whose boundaries bow out and squiggle to include the Glades, Mangonia Park and Riviera Beach before dipping down to encompass heavily Black portions of Broward County.

There are many oddly shaped districts in the Sunshine State, and DeSantis could ask state legislators to change their boundaries during any of the two-week committee meetings scheduled to be held in Tallahassee in October, November and December. The 2026 legislative session is also scheduled to begin in mid-January and run through March, a month before the April 20-24 filing window for candidates who want to run in the mid-term elections in November 2026.

Aug. 26 (UPI) — The League of Women Voters said Tuesday it opposed the unconventional mid-cycle congressional district redrawing effort led by Republicans. The group outlined non-partisan advice to help guide state lawmakers.

The league said it opposed mid-cycle gerrymandering because it can “easily be used to disenfranchise voters based on race or party affiliation,” read a joint statement by LWV’s CEO Celina Stewart and its president, Dianna Wynn.

The Washington-based League of Women Voters unveiled its guidance on mid-cycle map drawing for governors and state legislators under the heading of “No Harm to Our Communities: Mapping Guidance for Elected Leaders.”

Wynn and Stewart called the Republican-led political moves “uncharted territory” for the country.

The two pointed blame to an “unpopular, authoritarian president” who they said “exploits racial division and seeks to silence voters in a shameless bid for power” as Republicans fear losses in the 2026 midterm elections.

NEW YORK (AP) — A conservative election researcher whose faulty findings on voter data were cited by President Donald Trump as he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss has been appointed to an election integrity role at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey is now serving as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans, an organizational chart on its website shows.

The political appointment, first reported by Democracy Docket, shows how self-styled election investigators who have thrown themselves into election conspiracy theories since 2020 are now being celebrated by a presidential administration that indulges their false claims. 

Her new role, which didn’t exist under President Joe Biden, also comes as Trump has used election integrity concerns as a pretext to try to give his administration power over how elections are runin the U.S.

Florida election officials and voting rights advocates want to get the word out now that if you’ve renewed or replaced your state driver’s license or state ID in the past year, that could affect your ability to vote by mail or have your signature on a petition ballot be counted.

The change in policy started more than year ago. Beginning on July 31, 2024, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles began implementing legislation that requires the distinguishing numbers assigned to a driver’s license or identification card to include at least four randomly generated numbers. The agency says the change was done “to improve security and safeguard individuals’ identities.”

That change means that when voters go online to apply for a vote-by-mail ballot, they could encounter error messages if their driver’s license information is out of sync with the information they supplied when registering to vote.

“The main problem is that information isn’t being forwarded to supervisor of elections or local elected officials, and that becomes an issue mainly for vote-by-mail voters and those signing petitions, because more recent laws have made strict requirements for ID numbers,” said Brad Ashwell, Florida director for All Voting Is Local.

MIAMI — A federal court ruled Thursday that the state of Florida and the Trump administration can’t add to the population of the immigration detention facility in the Everglades dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” — and must take steps to begin dismantling it.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said in a case that challenged the facility’s operation on environmental grounds that the state must stop construction at the facility and, within 60 days, remove fencing, lighting, and generators.

Florida’s top emergency management official, Kevin Guthrie, quickly appealed the ruling.

Authorities have not disclosed the number of people held at the detention facility in the vast wetlands west of Miami.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis opened it in July and said it would eventually hold up to 4,000 people facing deportation under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Williams noted that the detention center was intended to be a short-term stopover for people facing deportation and that her ruling would result in a steady population decline through attrition.

TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Gov. Ron DeSantis isn’t budging on his push for mid-decade redistricting in the nation’s third-largest state, even as the war over congressional maps is currently being waged largely between Texas and California.

DeSantis — along with Attorney General James Uthmeier — laid out reasons Wednesday why the Florida Legislature may eventually need to redraw maps. Florida’s current maps — which were muscled into law by DeSantis three years ago — already give the GOP a 20-8 delegation edge.

Both top Republican officials continue to blast the last Census as flawed, with both raising questions as to whether Florida was deliberately undercounted to ensure it did not gain more than one seat following the 2020 Census. Uthmeier went so far as to mention a “deep state” effort to deny extra representation to Florida.

President Donald Trump on Monday vowed more changes to the way elections are conducted in the U.S., but based on the Constitution there is little to nothing he can do on his own.

Relying on false information and conspiracy theories that he’s regularly used to explain away his 2020 election loss, Trump pledged on his social media site that he would do away with both mail voting — which remains popular and is used by about one-third of all voters — and voting machines — some form of which are used in almost all of the country’s thousands of election jurisdictions. These are the same systems that enabled Trump to win the 2024 election and Republicans to gain control of Congress.

Trump’s post marks an escalation even in his normally overheated election rhetoric. He issued a wide-ranging executive order earlier this year that, among other changes,would have required documented proof-of-citizenship before registering to vote. His Monday post promised another election executive order to “help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm elections.”

The same post also pushed falsehoods about voting. He claimed the U.S. is the only country to use mail voting, when it’s actually used by dozens, including Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Leaders of the two most populous states, Democrats in California and Republicans in Texas, are trying to redraw the voting lines for the midterm congressional elections next year. It’s a break from the usual process and was touched off by President Trump calling on Texas to give Republican candidates an edge.

For months, the slim Republican majority in Congress has given the green light to mass deportations, health care cuts, tax breaks and many other Trump priorities.

But Republicans have only a 219-to-212 advantage in the U.S. House. To maintain that majority, the White House is calling on GOP-led states to redraw their voting maps in ways that help Republican candidates win more seats.

States usually redistrict early in each decade after the census count. This technical process is important. Whichever way people vote, the way they’re grouped in congressional districts can determine who wins and whether a citizen’s vote makes a difference.

The Texas and California legislatures plan to meet on their opposing plans this week.

President Trump sparked a national sprint to redistrict when he asked Texas Republicans to draw five more congressional seats for the GOP in their state ahead of next year’s elections.

In response, Democratic and Republican leaders in at least seven other states have said they’re open to moving their political lines in the fight over the U.S. House, but that means very different things in different places.

States are often bound by constitutional language and laws that dictate how redistricting happens. And time is running out for maps to be set ahead of the 2026 midterms.

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To see how likely redistricting is before then, we asked reporters in the NPR Network to explain what’s going on in their states.

Just weeks after Florida’s Supreme Court weakened voter-approved restrictions against gerrymandering, Governor Ron DeSantis is already pushing to take advantage of the new ruling.

Fresh off a 5-1 Supreme Court win in his pocket, DeSantis announced plans to redraw Florida’s congressional map again, well before the next census. “Stay tuned,” DeSantis teased at a press conference outside of Tampa in late July.

The push is already underway, adding to a national effort by the GOP, in full swing in Texas, to lock in more seats before the midterms. Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez said he will name the members of a new redistricting committee next month.

Even if Republicans forgo a new map this year, the ruling locks in Florida’s existing gerrymander, and it’s likely to embolden the GOP whenever it next redistricts the state.

The court blessed DeSantis’ 2022 push to dismantle a North Florida district where Black voters had consistently elected their preferred candidate for three decades. 

More than that, the justices signaled a retreat in their willingness to protect Black voting power with the Fair Districts Amendments, a set of standards approved by voters in 2010.

If Republicans succeed in pulling off an aggressively partisan gerrymander of congressional districts in Texas, they will owe the Supreme Court a debt of gratitude.

In the two decades Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has led the Supreme Court, the justices have reshaped American elections not just by letting state lawmakers like those in Texas draw voting maps warped by politics, but also by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and amplifying the role of money in politics.

Developments in recent weeks signaled that some members of the court think there is more work to be done in removing legal guardrails governing elections. There are now signs that court is considering striking down or severely constraining the remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act, a towering achievement of the civil rights movement that has protected the rights of minority voters since it was enacted 60 years ago last week.

Taken together, the court’s actions in election cases in recent years have shown great tolerance for partisan gamesmanship and great skepticism about federal laws on campaign spending and minority rights. The court’s rulings have been of a piece with its conservative wing’s jurisprudential commitments: giving states leeway in many realms, insisting on an expansive interpretation of the First Amendment and casting a skeptical eye on government racial classifications.

TALLAHASSEE, Florida — The nation’s redistricting war is now officially coming to Florida.

Citing a recent court ruling on the state’s congressional map, state House Speaker Daniel Perez said Thursday he’s creating a select committee to look at drawing up new districts seven years ahead of the normal schedule.

“Exploring these questions now, at the mid-decade point, would potentially allow us to seek legal guidance from our supreme court without the uncertainty associated with deferring those questions until after the next decennial census and reapportionment,” Perez explained in a memo sent out to House members.

Florida’s decision to enter the fray over redistricting comes amid a political donnybrook sweeping the nation from New York to Texas, Indiana and California. The White House has pressured Republicans in Texas to enact a new congressional map that would generate up to five new GOP seats in that state. Texas Democrats this week left their state to avoid a quorum and halt the state Legislature’s business.

Republicans already hold a commanding 20-8 congressional delegation margin in Florida thanks to a map muscled into law three years ago by Gov. Ron DeSantis that flipped four seats. The GOP also has a supermajority in the Florida Legislature, and there are not enough Democrats to block lawmakers from passing a new map. DeSantis has to sign off on any changes to the congressional map, but he has already said he is open to redrawing the districts after the Florida Supreme Court upheld the current map.

President Trump on Thursday announced he had instructed the Commerce Department to “immediately” begin working on a new census.

The big picture: The development comes as the White House is pushing red states to draw new congressional maps more favorable to Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterms. The Constitution requires the census every 10 years to apportion congressional districts.

Driving the news: Trump, in a Thursday Truth Social post, called for a “new and highly accurate” census “based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024.”

• He added that “[p]eople who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.”
• Per the Census website, the Decennial U.S. Census is designed to count every resident in the United States and is mandated by Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. 

Zoom out: The next census is set to take place in 2030.

• Preparing for the count is a complex process that takes several yearsof planning.
• The Commerce Department, run by Secretary Howard Lutnick, oversees the Census Bureau. 
• The Commerce Department and Census Bureau didn’t immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment.

Join us Wednesday, August 6 from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. ET for food, music and joyful resistance! We are gathering to claim our power and celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act!

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was signed into law on August 6, 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. We are coming together to celebrate the protections it promised and empower each other as the fight for a free and fair democracy continues. As the Voting Rights Act and many of our most valued freedoms continue to be attacked at the state and national level, join us as we counter fear and repression with joy and collective strength.

Where: Callahan Neighborhood Center
101 N. Parramore Ave.
Orlando, Florida 32801

When: 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

NEW YORK (AP) — The requests have come in letters, emails and phone calls. The specifics vary, but the target is consistent: The U.S. Department of Justice is ramping up an effort to get voter data and other election information from the states.

Over the past three months, the department’s voting section has requested copies of voter registration lists from state election administrators in at least 15 states, according to an Associated Press tally. Of those, nine are Democrats, five are Republicans and one is a bipartisan commission. 

In Colorado, the department demanded “all records” relating to the 2024 election and any records the state retained from the 2020 election.

Department lawyers have contacted officials in at least seven states to propose a meeting about forging an information-sharing agreement related to instances of voting or election fraud. The idea, they say in the emails, is for states to help the department enforce the law.

The unusually expansive outreach has raised alarm among some election officials because states have the constitutional authority to run elections and federal law protects the sharing of individual data with the government.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Democrats reintroduced a bill Tuesday to restore and expand protections enshrined in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, their latest long-shot attempt to revive the landmark law just days before its 60th anniversary and at a time of renewed debate over the future administration of American elections.

Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia unveiled the measure, titled the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, with the backing of Democratic leaders. The bill stands little chance of passage in the Republican-led Congress, but it provides the clearest articulation of Democrats’ agenda on voting rights and election reform.

The legislation would reestablish and expand the requirement that states and localities with a history of discrimination get federal approval before changing their voting laws. It would also require states to allow same-day voter registration, prevent voters from being purged from voter rolls if they miss elections and allow people who may have been disenfranchised at the ballot box to seek a legal remedy in the courts.

“Democracy is the very house in which we live. It is the framework in which we get to fight for the things that we care about,” Warnock said. “These last seven months have reminded us that we ought not take any of it for granted. We are literally in a fight for the life of the republic.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court panel on Monday ruled that private individuals and organizations cannot bring voting rights cases under a section of the law that allows others to assist voters who are blind, have disabilities or are unable to read.

It’s the latest ruling from the St. Louis-based 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, saying only the government can bring lawsuits alleging violations of the Voting Rights Act. The findings upend decades of precedent and will likely be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The case centered on whether an Arkansas law that limits how many voters can be assisted by one person conflicts with Section 208 of the landmark federal law. 

The opinion from the three-judge panel followed the reasoning of another 8th Circuit panel in a previous case from 2023. That opinion held that the Arkansas State Conference NAACP and the Arkansas Public Policy Conference could not bring cases under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

“Like the provision at issue in Arkansas State Conference, we conclude the text and structure of (Section) 208 do not create a private right of action,” said the decision written by Judge L. Steven Grasz, a nominee of President Donald Trump. “Likewise, we conclude no private right of action is created by the Supremacy Clause.”

Today is another dark day in the history of Florida. With today’s ruling, the Florida Supreme Court has turned its back on Black voters, the state constitution, and the fundamental principles of representative democracy.

By allowing a map that clearly diminishes Black voting power to stand in a 5-1 decision, the Court has sent a chilling message: the constitutional rights of Black Floridians are negotiable, and the will of the people can be ignored, even when it is written into the very fabric of our laws.

This ruling, handed down by a court largely appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis, disregards the Fair Districts Amendments, which were overwhelmingly passed by Florida voters to protect minority voters and prevent partisan gerrymandering. It confirms that even when communities play by the rules, organize, and demand fairness, those in power can still bend the system to serve themselves.

At the heart of this case was a basic question: Do Black Floridians have the right to fair representation in Congress? Today, the Court answered with a resounding no.

This is not just a legal setback, it is a direct attack on Black political power and a decision that will have ripple effects for generations. It cements an unjust political advantage and further erodes trust in our institutions.

A Florida Senator is among those outraged over a video appearing to show a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO) stop escalating to violence against a 22-year-old suspect.

“Once again, we are faced with a sickening reminder of the systemic issues that plague our law enforcement,” said Democratic Sen. Shevrin Jones of Miami Gardens.

“The video coming out of Jacksonville is deeply disturbing and completely unacceptable. To witness an officer assault an unarmed Black man during what should have been a routine traffic stop is a stark demonstration of the continued racial bias and excessive force that far too many Black individuals experience in our communities. Never mind the fact that the driver was baselessly stopped for not using headlights during broad daylight.”

The driver, William McNeil, was allegedly pulled over in February during the day for not having headlights on. As he noted in the video, which was just released, it was not raining.

JSO has said there is an internal investigation ongoing, but for Jones, the issue is systemic.

Today is another dark day in the history of Florida. With today’s ruling, the Florida Supreme Court has turned its back on Black voters, the state constitution, and the fundamental principles of representative democracy.

By allowing a map that clearly diminishes Black voting power to stand in a 5-1 decision, the Court has sent a chilling message: the constitutional rights of Black Floridians are negotiable, and the will of the people can be ignored, even when it is written into the very fabric of our laws.

This ruling, handed down by a court largely appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis, disregards the Fair Districts Amendments, which were overwhelmingly passed by Florida voters to protect minority voters and prevent partisan gerrymandering. It confirms that even when communities play by the rules, organize, and demand fairness, those in power can still bend the system to serve themselves.

At the heart of this case was a basic question: Do Black Floridians have the right to fair representation in Congress? Today, the Court answered with a resounding no.

This is not just a legal setback, it is a direct attack on Black political power and a decision that will have ripple effects for generations. It cements an unjust political advantage and further erodes trust in our institutions.

Florida’s Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the state’s current congressional redistricting map, rejecting a challenge over the elimination of a majority-Black district in north Florida that was pushed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The court, dominated by DeSantis appointees, ruled that restoration of the district that previously united Black communities from Jacksonville to west of Tallahassee, or across 200 miles (322 kilometers), would amount to impermissible racial gerrymandering. That, the majority ruled, violates the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees.

“The record leaves no doubt that such a district would be race-predominant. The record also gives us no reasonable basis to think that further litigation would uncover a potentially viable remedy,” said Chief Justice Carlos Muniz in the court’s majority opinion.

The decision means Florida’s current congressional districts that give Republicans a 20-8 advantage over Democrats will remain in place for the 2026 midterm elections and beyond. The former north Florida district was most recently represented by a Black Democrat, former Rep. Al Lawson. The new districts divide that area among three Republicans.

The U.S. Department of Justice has unnerved some state election officials by issuing sweeping requests for information that it says is pertinent to enforcing federal election laws and investigating voting crimes, which President Donald Trump has identified as priorities.

In letters sent to at least a dozen states over the past two months, according to documents obtained by Votebeat and reported elsewhere, the department asked for varied sets of data and records, including voter rolls, information on potential election and voting crimes, data from past elections, and details about procedures for maintaining voter lists and checking voters’ eligibility. 

State officials say privately that they have been struck by the scope of the requests and uncertainty around what the administration plans to do with the information, and have been talking to one another about them. Many of these officials have faced years of near-constant scrutiny as Trump and his allies have repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims of election malfeasance, and the president has tried to use his influence and official authority to rewrite the history of his 2020 election loss. 

While the requests so far are mostly for data or procedures that are public information or accessible by law to the Justice Department, election law experts said, some of them were more questionable.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration left many local officials in the dark about the immigration detention center that rose from an isolated airstrip in the Everglades, emails obtained by The Associated Press show, while relying on an executive order to seize the land, hire contractors and bypass laws and regulations.

The emails show that local officials in southwest Florida were still trying to chase down a “rumor” about the sprawling “Alligator Alcatraz” facility planned for their county while state officials were already on the ground and sending vendors through the gates to coordinate construction of the detention center, which was designed to house thousands of migrants and went up in a matter of days.

“Not cool!” one local official told the state agency director spearheading the construction.

The 100-plus emails dated June 21 to July 1, obtained through a public records request, underscore the breakneck speed at which the governor’s team built the facility and the extent to which local officials were blindsided by the plans for the compound of makeshift tents and trailers in Collier County, a wealthy, majority-Republican corner of the state that’s home to white-sand beaches and the western stretch of the Everglades.

CNN’s Joan Biskupic talks with Wolf Blitzer about Justice Clarence Thomas’ quest to undo a key part of the Voting Rights Act and about whether his conservative justices are now will to join him.

CNN’s Joan Biskupic talks with Wolf Blitzer about Justice Clarence Thomas’ quest to undo a key part of the Voting Rights Act and about whether his conservative justices are now will to join him.

Nearly half of local election officials are concerned about politically motivated investigations targeting election workers, according to a new survey from the Brennan Center for Justice.

Forty-six percent of local election officials said they were at least somewhat concerned about politically motivated investigations of their work or the work of other election officials. Of that, 18 percent of respondents said they were “very concerned” about potential investigations.

Election officials have increasingly become targets of scrutiny in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, when President Donald Trump and his allies touted conspiracy theories about ballot processing to claim the results of the election — which he lost — were rigged.

Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly advocated for greater “election integrity,” while disavowing state and local election officials around the country. Project 2025, the conservative policy agenda laid out ahead of Trump’s second term, endorses investigating and prosecuting election officials. And following Joe Biden’s 2024 loss, similar conspiracies of a rigged election have percolated among some liberals online — although notably these theories have not been embraced by Democratic Party leaders or elected officials.

TALLAHASSEE — A federal judge has blocked a key part of a new law that imposed additional restrictions on the state’s ballot initiative process, saying a ban on non-Florida residents and non-U.S. citizens collecting and delivering petitions “imposes a severe burden on political expression that the state has failed to justify.”

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker’s ruling Tuesday, however, allowed several other parts of the law to remain in effect, including a requirement that people who gather more than 25 signed petitions register with the state and a moratorium on elections supervisors processing petitions from July 1 through Sept. 30.

Florida Decides Healthcare, a political committee sponsoring a proposed constitutional amendment aimed at expanding Medicaid coverage, filed the court challenge in May after the Republican-controlled Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis approved the law. Smart & Safe Florida, a committee behind a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow recreational marijuana, also is a plaintiff in the case. A committee proposing a measure aimed at ensuring access to clean water also has joined the challengers.

Walker’s ruling came after the committees requested a preliminary injunction to block parts of the law, which took effect July 1.

The calls from Alligator Alcatraz’s first detainees brought distressing news: Toilets that didn’t flush. Temperatures that went from freezing to sweltering. A hospital visit. Giant bugs. And little or no access to showers or toothbrushes, much less confidential calls with attorneys.

The stories, relayed to the Miami Herald by the wives of detainees housed in Florida’s makeshift detention center for migrants in the Everglades, offer the first snapshots of the conditions inside the newly opened facility, which began accepting detainees on July 2. They reveal detainees who are frightened not just about being deported, but also about how they are being treated by the government, which is saying little about what is taking place inside.

“Why would we treat a human like that?” a woman whose Venezuelan husband is housed in Alligator Alcatraz told the Miami Herald. “They come here for a better life. I don’t understand. We are supposed to be the greatest nation under God, but we forget that we’re under God.”

The men, whose identities the Herald is withholding due to their families’ fears that the government will punish them for speaking out, described harsh conditions at the detention center, pitched as a new model for holding migrants ensnared in President Donald Trump’s war on illegal immigration. The state, which intends to eventually house 3,000 or more people at the site, has said the detainees’ descriptions provided to the Herald are “untrue.”

A group of Democratic state legislators said Thursday they were denied entry to “Alligator Alcatraz,” the newly opened controversial immigration detention center in the Everglades.

“This is a blatant abuse of power and an attempt to conceal human rights violations from the public eye,” said the legislators in a joint statement. “If the facility is unsafe for elected officials to enter, then how can it possibly be safe for those being detained inside?

State Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-Miami Gardens, state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, along with state Reps. Dr. Anna V. Eskamani, D-Orlando, Angie Nixon, D-Jacksonville, and Michele Rayner, D-St. Petersburg, said they were “illegally” denied access to the facility off Tamiami Trail in Ochopee.

They said state officials flatly denied them entry to the facility Thursday afternoon when they first arrived and then later, when pressed, the legislators said state officials offered “vague safety concerns” without any specific details.

The legislators said they wanted to visit the facility because of “legal, moral, and humanitarian concerns” raised following the DeSantis administration announcement of the plans.

“Florida law is unambiguous — state legislators have full access to inspect any state-operated facility. This is not a federal facility,” said the legislators. “Denying us entry is not only unlawful — it’s a disgrace. We will be back.”

The House Homeland Security Committee’s Democratic members made allusions to Nazi Germany as they assailed “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new immigration detention facility in the Florida Everglades that President Donald Trump toured Tuesday.

“Historically, never a bad sign when fascists start building camps,” the committee posted on X on Tuesday alongside a video of Trump advocating for similar facilities in other states.

Trump visited the site alongside Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The governor, Trump’s onetime opponent in the 2024 Republican primary, has pledged his state’s support as the White House works to enact its sweeping mass deportation agenda.

Photos of the facility from Trump’s tour showed dozens of bunk beds arranged in cages inside a large tent.

“They want a bunch of people… interned…in a camp of some sorts…I wonder what we should call this?” the committee wrote in another post.

With less than five months to go before Miami residents were scheduled to head to the polls to vote on a new mayor and city commissioners, the city of Miami has postponed the upcoming November election to 2026 in a move that critics have described as a “power grab.”

On Thursday, the Miami City Commission voted 3-2 to move the city from odd- to even-year elections — a change that its proponents said will drastically increase voter turnout. But the decision also comes with fine print.

As a result, the city’s elected officials will get an extra year in office. That includes Mayor Francis Suarez and Commissioner Joe Carollo, who are both term limited. Suarez, a former city commissioner, will get a 17th consecutive year in Miami City Hall, and Carollo will get a ninth.

Commissioners Damian Pardo, Ralph Rosado and Christine King voted in favor of the election date change, and Commissioners Miguel Angel Gabela and Carollo voted against.

Republicans in Florida racially gerrymandered two key state senate districts to disenfranchise Black voters and skew results in the Tampa Bay area, a panel of judges has heard.

In one district, they took a small chunk of St Petersburg heavy with minority voters and added it to an area of Tampa in a different county, and across a 10-mile waterway, leaving the remainder of its electorate “artificially white”, the court was told.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, representing voters at a four-day trial in Tampa last week, said the state’s defense that the waters of Tampa Bay made the new district contiguous was ridiculous, pointing out in the lawsuit that “manatees don’t vote”.

“These are cities on opposite sides of the bay and there’s no way to go directly between them,” Caroline McNamara, an ACLU staff attorney, said.

“You either have to go across 10 miles of open ocean at the mouth of Tampa Bay, or you have to cut through other districts in the area through the north end.”

The case has direct parallels in previous moves by Republican officials in Florida to manipulate voting districts to their advantage by undercutting Black voting power.

Equal Ground is hosting community forums via a tour to educate the public about what went down at this year’s Florida legislative session.

The tour started on June 7 in Tampa. Stops are scheduled through Aug. 16; the last one is scheduled in the Panhandle.

Stops were made in Volusia County last week at Greater Union First Baptist Church in DeLand on June 9 and at the Center for Civic Engagement on the campus of Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach a day earlier.

“The meetings were well received. 

We desire to have more turnout; however, we had over 50 people at both stops in Volusia County. We are just educating people on the laws that were passed and those that didn’t, said Genesis Robinson, executive director of Equal Ground.

“We want to update the people. We want people to understand these laws and how these laws impact their lives.’’

Equal Ground is grassroots, Black-led political action organization focusing on voter information, voter education, voter registration and political action.

In North Carolina, it was a lawsuit over the state’s voter registration records. In Arizona and Wisconsin, it was a letter to state election officials warning of potential administrative violations. And in Colorado, it was a demand for election records going back to 2020.

Those actions in recent weeks by the U.S. Department of Justice’s voting section may seem focused on the technical machinery of how elections are run but signal deeper changes when combined with the departures of career attorneys and decisions to dropvarious voting rights cases.

They represent a shift away from the division’s traditional role of protecting access to the ballot box. Instead, the actions address concerns that have been raised by a host of conservative activists following years of false claims surrounding elections in the U.S. Some voting rights and election experts also note that by targeting certain states — presidential battlegrounds or those controlled by Democrats — the moves could be foreshadowing an expanded role for the department in future elections.

David Becker, a former department attorney who worked on voting rights cases and now leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the Justice Department’s moves represent a departure from focusing on major violations of federal law.

A panel of three federal judges is now weighing whether a Tampa Bay state Senate district created in 2022 was the result of illegal racial gerrymandering.

A four-day trial resulting from a lawsuit over the district concluded on Thursday afternoon and judges must decide whether the constitutional rights of voters in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties were violated when the Legislature created the Senate district in 2022 that crossed from St. Petersburg over the water to Hillsborough County.

Florida was sued by three voters who are represented by the ACLU of Florida and the Civil Rights & Racial Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law. The plaintiffs allege that the Legislature’s plan to connect Black populations from parts of Hillsborough and Pinellas counties violated their equal-protection rights by unjustifiably concentrating Black voters into District 16 by removing them from nearby District 18, reducing their influence there.

The defendants, Senate President Ben Albritton and Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, have denied that claim, saying that the maps were lawfully drawn up and previously approved as legally sound by the Florida Supreme Court.

TAMPA, Fla. — A federal trial is underway in Tampa this week as a panel of three judges hears arguments in a lawsuit challenging a Tampa Bay-area Senate district, alleging the district map was racially gerrymandered in violation of constitutional rights.

The suit was filed by the ACLU of Florida and several voters from the Tampa Bay area. Plaintiffs claim the 2022-adopted district map improperly packs Black voters into District 16, diluting their electoral influence, particularly in Pinellas County.

District 16, currently represented by Democratic State Sen. Darryl Rouson, stretches across Tampa Bay, linking the southern portion of St. Petersburg with parts of Tampa and Hillsborough County.

“We’re not asking for special treatment,” St. Petersburg resident and plaintiff Meiko Seymour said in an interview with 10 Tampa Bay. “We’re asking for fair representation.”

Seymour and others argue that crossing the bay to group voters of color into a single district limits their influence in their direct neighborhood.

“When lines are drawn in a way to pack Black voters into one district, it actually weakens our influence across the rest of the city,” Seymour said. “It keeps us from having an actual seat at the table where decisions are being made that impact our schools, our streets and our future.”

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV/Gray Florida Capital Bureau) – A federal judge has partially blocked Florida’s new law regulating how citizens get constitutional amendments on the ballot.

Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a motion for a preliminary injunction Wednesday. However, the injunction only applied to part of the law. 

Among the several new rules outlined in the law are requiring petition circulators to be registered voters in Florida, shortening the time circulators have to turn in petitions and requiring Financial Impact statements on the petition.

In his order, the judge denied requests to put a stay on those rules. However, he did grant a plaintiff’s request for an injunction to the part of Florida’s new law pertaining to racketeering activity.

“The question for this Court is whether Florida’s expansion of its RICO statute to prohibit committing violations ‘of the Florida Election Code relating to irregularities or fraud involving issue petition activities” is “so vague and standardless that it leaves the public uncertain as to the conduct it prohibits or leaves judges and jurors free to decide, without any legally fixed standards, what is prohibited and what is not in each particular case,’” the order said in part.

A possible proposal by the Miami Commission to shift municipal elections from odd- to even-numbered years — effectively extending current officials’ terms by a year — has drawn threat of legal action from one of the city’s mayoral candidates.

In an email, candidate Michael Hepburn warned Mayor Francis Suarez and the Commission’s four current members against pursuing the change. If they insist on doing so, he said he would tap civil rights lawyer Ben Crump “and others to bring a lawsuit against this action and the city.”

The potential election change, first flagged by Tess Riski of the Miami Herald last month, would delay the scheduled November 2025 city elections to 2026, granting Suarez and Commissioners Joe Carollo and Christine King an additional year in office.

Commissioners Miguel Gabela and Damian Pardo, meanwhile, would stay in office until November 2028 rather than November 2027.

Donald Trump has made false claims about voter fraud central to his political identity and issued a sweeping anti-voting executive order in March. Now he’s weaponizing the Justice Department to advance his voter suppression agenda.

On Tuesday, in its first major voting-related lawsuit, the Trump Justice Department sued the state of North Carolina over its voter rolls, reviving arguments that Republican judicial candidate Jefferson Griffin used to try to throw out tens of thousands of ballots in an effort to overturn the victory of Democratic North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs.

“It’s no accident they’ve chosen a case in which the Republican candidate lost and they’re echoing his exact claims,” says Chiraag Bains, who served as deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Joe Biden and as a senior counsel in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division from 2010 to 2017.

The Justice Department claims that North Carolina violated the Help America Vote Act of 2002 by failing to collect voters’ driver’s license or Social Security numbers when they registered. Griffin challenged the eligibility of more than 60,000 voters who he claimed fell into that category, even though all of those voters showed identification when they cast a ballot and his legal team never presented a single instance of a someone voting improperly.

Some Republican-led states are moving to require voters to prove their citizenship, as Texas advances a controversial measure that could make it harder for eligible voters to get on the rolls because of changed names, mislaid paperwork or database errors.

Voting rights advocates and Democrats warn the plans could prove particularly tricky for people who change their names, including women who do so when they get married or divorced, because their legal names don’t match the ones on their birth certificates. Supporters call the criticism overblown, saying most Americans can readily show they are citizens.

The emerging laws are part of a GOP push led by President Donald Trump to tighten requirements to cast ballots. Voting by noncitizens is both illegal and rare, and the attempts to crack down on voting by foreigners could drive down participation from a much larger pool of legitimate voters, according to election experts.

The Texas legislation passed the state Senate last month, and Republican proponents are hoping to advance the bill through the House by next week as the legislative session wraps up. As two dozen other states consider similar measures, Texas Republicans are weighing whether to change their proposal to more smoothly accommodate name changes, according to people tracking the legislation. The political fight in the state illuminates a larger debate across the country over how to balance election security and access to the ballot.

TALLAHASSEE — “Fear and uncertainty” about a new law targeting the state’s ballot initiative process has led to a significant drop in people working to collect signatures for 2026 ballot measures, groups challenging the law told a federal judge on Thursday.

One of the most controversial parts of the law, passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature on May 2 and immediately signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, shortens from 30 to 10 days the length of time to submit signed petitions to supervisors of elections.

In addition, the law includes hefty fines for petitions that are filed late and makes it a felony for petition gatherers to retain voters’ personal information on petitions or make changes to completed petitions. Groups accused of “substantial irregularities” in the petition process could face racketeering charges.

Florida Decides Healthcare, a committee sponsoring a proposed constitutional amendment aimed at expanding Medicaid coverage, quickly filed the lawsuit this month to challenge parts of the law. Smart & Safe Florida, a committee behind a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow recreational marijuana, also is a plaintiff in the case. A similar marijuana proposal narrowly failed to pass in November, and the committee is trying to go back to voters in 2026.

PARKS: And today on the show, direct democracy. We’ve talked a lot in recent years about ballot measures allowing voters to weigh in directly on things like reproductive freedom and ranked choice voting. But now, Ashley, you are reporting that a number of Republican-led states are making it harder to get these sort of initiatives on the ballot. So I want to take a step back and just talk about the process of how things get on a ballot more broadly. Can you walk us through how something becomes kind of a vague political idea to actually getting something voters weigh in on?

LOPEZ: Yeah, so there are about two dozen states in this country that allow citizens to petition their state to change its laws, usually by amending their constitution. And how this works for the most part is fairly straightforward. You have to get a certain number of voters to sign a petition to get an issue on a ballot. And depending where you live, there are rules about who collects those signatures, how, and how much time they have. And then if state officials and, you know, oftentime (ph) the courts get involved – if they say that the language passes legal muster, then that will appear on a ballot before voters. And typically, if a measure gets a majority approval – and then it passes.

‘Together, we’re creating a space for real, honest conversations — the kind that move us forward.’

Civil rights leaders and grassroots groups are set to gather in Miami Gardens for “The People’s Meetup,” a town hall led by Democratic state Sen. Shevrin Jones focused on mobilizing Black voters and advancing social justice.

The May 31 event will feature U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Texas civil rights and criminal defense lawyer, and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who represented the families of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among others.

A coalition of local and statewide organizations is also partnering with Jones for the event. Among them: Black Voters Matter, Equality Florida, Florida Student Power, Moms Demand Action, the NAACP and SAVE.

“This isn’t another town hall — it’s a community-powered gathering,” Jones said in a statement. “Together, we’re creating a space for real, honest conversations — the kind that move us forward.”

Jones, the first openly gay Black lawmaker elected to the Florida Senate, has built a reputation for grassroots organizing and civic mobilization. He previously spearheaded Operation BlackOut, a statewide voter engagement campaign launched in 2022 that focused on turning out Black and Brown progressive voters in underserved communities.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court seemed intent Thursday on maintaining a block on President Donald Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship while looking for a way to scale back nationwide court orders.

It was unclear what such a decision might look like, but a majority of the court expressed concerns about would happen if the Trump administration were allowed, even temporarily, to deny citizenship to children born to people who are in the United States illegally.

The justices heard arguments in the Trump administration’s emergency appeals over lower court orders that have kept the citizenship restrictions on hold across the country. 

Nationwide injunctions have emerged as an important check on Trump’s efforts to remake the government and a source of mounting frustration to the Republican president and his allies.

Judges have issued 40 nationwide injunctions since Trump began his second term in January, Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court at the start of more than two hours of arguments.

President Trump has ordered federal agencies to abandon the use of a longstanding legal tool used to root out discrimination against minorities, a move that could defang the nation’s bedrock civil rights law.

In an expansive executive order, Mr. Trump directed the federal government to curtail the use of “disparate-impact liability,” a core tenet used for decades to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by determining whether policies disproportionately disadvantage certain groups.

The little-noticed order, issued last month with a spate of others targeting equity policies, was the latest effort in Mr. Trump’s aggressive push to purge the consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., from the federal government and every facet of American life.

The directive underscores how Mr. Trump’s crusade to stamp out D.E.I. — a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male — is now focused not just on targeting programs and policies that may assist historically marginalized groups, but also on the very law created to protect them.

An election bill requiring new Florida voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship failed to advance in the just-concluded regular legislative session, drawing sighs of relief from both voting-rights and voting-integrity groups, although for different reasons.

The measure arose shortly after President Trump issued his executive order requiring voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. “This bill fully answers the president’s call,” said Lee County Republican Persons-Mulicka when introducing her proposal (HB 1381) before the House Government Operations Subcommittee on April 1.

The bill would have mandated that all voter registration applications, including any with a change in name, address, or party affiliation, could only be accepted after the Florida Department of State verified that the applicant was a U.S. citizen in one of three ways:

• The applicant’s voter record indicated that his or her legal status as a U.S. citizen had been verified.
• The applicant’s legal status as a citizen was matched against records of the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles or U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
• Or the voter showing one of seven identification sources, such as a driver license, a U.S. passport. or a birth certificate.

Critics noted that the provision removed several previous categories to verify voter identification, such as a debit or credit card, student identification, or retirement cards.

After a wave of successful citizen-led efforts to expand abortion rights via ballot measures, some state legislatures are making it harder for members of the public to put such measures before voters.

Florida, which late last week became the latest state to enact stricter rules around the process, is already facing a lawsuit over whether imposing more restrictions on the ballot initiative process is constitutional. The suit was brought by a group, Florida Decides Healthcare, that is trying to get a proposal on next year’s ballot to expand Medicaid in the state.

The group, which faces a February deadline to collect nearly 900,000 signatures from residents supportive of the plan, said that the new law was making signature-gatherers nervous.

The law imposes a possible criminal penalty if someone circulating petitions does not register with the state; limits to 25 the number of signatures that an unregistered canvasser can collect; requires canvassers to collect more identifying information, and shortens the time frame for petition submission to 10 days after signatures are received.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Progressive advocates have filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging new restrictions on Florida’s process to get citizen-driven initiatives on the ballot before voters. 

Florida Decides Healthcare, the campaign to secure a measure on the 2026 ballot to expand Medicaid in the state, is bringing the legal challenge, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Elias Law Group, which frequently represents Democratic groups and candidates.

Sunday’s filing came days after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the restrictions into law, over the objections of critics who argued the new hurdles would make it prohibitively expensive and effectively impossible for grassroots campaigners to get measures on the ballot.

“This bill is not about improving the ballot initiative process. It attacks the fundamental freedom of Floridians to participate in their own democracy,” said FDH Executive Director Mitch Emerson. “It is a calculated and cowardly attempt by politicians in Tallahassee to rewrite the rules — not to serve the people, but to protect their own power.”

TALLAHASSEE – On the last scheduled day of Florida’s regular legislative session, lawmakers passed a Gov. Ron DeSantis priority to change the state’s ballot initiative process.

DeSantis signed it into law just hours later Friday night.

The measure passed by the Legislature didn’t go as far as DeSantis’ office wanted. But opponents of the bill said it would still make it difficult for everyday people to participate in the ballot initiative process, and would instead keep power in the hands of state lawmakers and corporate interests.

The  Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act — the most extraordinary attack on voting rights in American history — faces a steep uphill battle in the U.S. Senate. 

But the more immediate threat to ballot access may be in the states, many of which are trying to pass their own version of the measure — or take similar steps to impose proof of citizenship requirements, potentially disenfranchising a large number of voters. 

According to Voting Rights Lab’s voter legislation tracker, there are currently 52 bills introduced in 24 states to impose or expand proof of citizenship requirements. “We’ve been hearing from the President and other members of the administration about their obsession with this lie that noncitizens are casting ballots,” Hannah Fried, the executive director of the nonpartisan voting rights organization All Voting is Local, told Democracy Docket. “That has a trickle down effect. That then leads to state legislatures trying to pass their own laws.”

Lawmakers in Indiana, New Hampshire, Michigan, Missouri, Texasand Utah have advanced anti-voting bills that require some form of strict voter ID and/or proof of citizenship in order to vote. Louisianaand Wyoming are, so far, the only new states this year to enact a proof of citizenship requirement. A similar law in New Hampshire went into effect in November. The Wyoming bill, which became law in March without Gov. Mark Gordon’s (R) signature, requires all voters to show proof of citizenship, along with their Wyoming residency, in order to register to vote. The law, which goes into effect in July, also makes it so that a county clerk can reject a voter’s registration if there’s “any indication” that the person is not a U.S. citizen or Wyoming resident.

Empowering the Latino community to actively shape our future is one of the things I hold closest to my heart. For me, voting is not just a right; it’s a responsibility — one that enables us to elect leaders who will build the Florida we want and deserve. Like many women citizens, I am driven by the desire to create a better tomorrow — not just for myself, but for my family as well. While the journey is demanding, it’s deeply rewarding because our community is eager to take part in positive, transformative change. Sadly, the barriers to our participation in this democratic process are growing.

For years, especially since the 2020 elections, my community has found itself at the heart of anti-voter rhetoric, largely fueled by conspiracy theorists and election deniers. These voices have weaponized false claims about illegal voting, attempting to vilify immigrant communities like ours. They’ve created a narrative that portrays us as fraudsters trying to exploit the system.

The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. What’s happening is simple: we are being scapegoated to push policies that will restrict access to the ballot box, aimed at diminishing the voting power of millions across our nation.

We’ve already witnessed the damage from such policies. From Trump’s Executive Order on Elections to the SAVE Act now pending in Congress, and even Florida’s own HB 1381, these measures have one thing in common: they require voters to prove their citizenship before being allowed to vote. Whether by birth certificate or passport, these “proof of citizenship” policies create a problem where none exists, because we have systems and safeguards in place to ensure only eligible voters can cast a ballot.

WASHINGTON – Dozens of states across the country are considering their own versions of a federal voting bill critics say could disenfranchise millions of Americans, including many married women.

Republican lawmakers in 24 states introduced measures requiring people to prove their citizenship, using documents such as birth certificates or passports, when they register to vote, according to the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab. Three other states – Louisiana, New Hampshire and Wyoming – have enacted similar laws in recent months. 

Supporters call the efforts a security measure and say they’re trying to reinforce laws barring noncitizens from voting. But voting rights advocates argue it’s already exceedingly rare for noncitizens to vote – and the laws could make it more difficult for millions of Americans to cast a ballot.

Opponents are particularly concerned the requirements will hit rural communities, military personnel and married women. About 83% of married women changed their name, and for many that means their birth certificates don’t match their current ID.

Listen closely to the arguments of the House Republicans pushing the so-called ‘Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act’ and you realize they aren’t interested in solving the problem the bill purports to address: non-citizens voting in federal elections. If you take the proponents of the bill at their word — that the measure is needed ‘to increase integrity of elections’ because ‘non-citizen voting decreases confidence in our elections’ — you’d expect a targeted proposal aimed at increasing enforcement with the goal of curbing the small percentage of non-citizen votes cast in any election. Instead, the SAVE Act uses a bazooka to kill a gnat. It prohibits state election officials from registering anyone to vote in federal elections unless the person ‘provides documentary proof of United States citizenship’ and produces, in person, either a passport or birth certificate.”

It is impossible to understand the United States without understanding the Civil War and Reconstruction. The American constitutional order went through more changes during those two decades than in the other 230 years of its existence combined. Now the Supreme Court may soon have another opportunity to revisit their contested aftermath.

A group of Virginia election officials asked the justices last month to effectively nullify one of the Reconstruction-era laws that set the terms for the state’s postwar readmission to the Union. In doing so, they hope to maintain a strict regime of disenfranchising Virginians with felony convictions that the Reconstruction-era Congress sought to prevent. Should the justices let the lower court’s decision stand, it could breathe new life to a long-forgotten congressional effort to protect multiracial democracy in the South.

The case springs from a decade-long conflict over the Virginia state constitution and its strict felon-disenfranchisement provision. Twenty-four states impose some sort of legal barrier on their residents’ right to vote after being convicted of a felony. Many of those states restore a prisoner’s voting rights after they complete their sentence, including probation and parole. Others make it permanent for certain crimes.

Virginia is an outlier: Anyone convicted of a felony in the state is automatically and permanently disenfranchised upon conviction. (They are also excluded from jury service and certain other civic rights and duties.) Under the state constitution, which was most recently rewritten in 1971, Virginians with felony convictions can only regain their right to vote after their “civil rights have been restored by the governor.”

Kimberly Pichardo, 27, took a spot in the DMV line around 9 a.m. on a cloudless Wednesday, back when her phone was fully charged and she wasn’t worried about the afternoon pickup time at her son’s school.

But as 2 o’clock approached under the Miami sun, a couple dozen people still stood between Pichardo and the Miami Central DMV office inside a shopping center off the Dolphin Expressway. Teachers had dismissed her son’s class about a half-hour earlier, leaving Pichardo to scramble for a plan B while her phone’s battery remained alive.

“I called my mom to pick him up right before my phone died,” Pichardo said. “What can I do?”

For people like Pichardo needing a driver’s license issued or updated in South Florida, there’s no easy answer to that question beyond the obvious one: get in line and wait.

Online portals for the 15 DMV offices in Broward and Miami-Dade routinely show no openings available — even eight weeks out. Lines for walk-up slots at the offices start forming hours before the doors open — and sometimes even the night before. While the staff did eventually open their doors to everyone in line the day Pichardo arrived, waits lasted hours.

When it comes to voting, Florida elected officials love to toot our own horn, claiming we are the “Free State of Florida” and a gold standard in elections. What those officials don’t say is that just a few short years ago, we were the gold standard. 

Now, Florida’s elected leaders are increasingly making it harder for eligible Florida voters to, well, vote. They are, in effect, picking their voters to ensure they remain in power. We’re seeing a perfect example of this playing out right now. House Bill 1381 is a terrible bill that will cause chaos and confusion for voters and election officials. It will make things especially hard for Florida’s seniors, students and rural voters. In fact, any eligible Florida voter with no valid passport or birth certificate that matches their current legal name could be kicked off the voter rolls.

Florida legislators were given an option to change that. In a strike-all amendment proposed in committee by Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis, they were given the ability to advance reforms that would help more eligible Florida voters access the ballot while maintaining the safety and security of our elections. They were given the option to move the Florida Voting Rights Act forward and once again make Florida the gold standard in elections. But legislators on the committee picked the bad option that makes voting harder for thousands.

While much of the spotlight in Washington has been on budget fights and new tariffs, the House passed a bill that could reshape how Americans register to vote. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act) would require voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship — such as a passport or birth certificate — in person when registering to vote or updating their voter registration. The measure now moves to the Senate, where Democrats have promised to block it.

Supporters of the SAVE Act argue the bill is needed to ensure noncitizens don’t vote in American elections. Studies and state level audits have found such cases are rare and only account for a tiny percentage of votes.

Republicans have long pushed for stricter laws to combat voting fraud, but experts warn the bill would undermine elections because millions of eligible Americans will face new barriers to voter registration. To understand the potential impact, NPR’s Michel Martin spoke with Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, which opposes the legislation.

President Donald Trump’s plan to overhaul elections could hurl 2026 into turmoil by forcing states to hand-count ballots or scramble to spend millions of dollars on voting systems that aren’t yet on the market, according to election officials and voting experts.

If put into effect, his recent executive order attempting to transform elections could make it impossible for some states to use voting machines, election experts said. No voting systems are commercially available that meet the standards the president put forward in his executive order. Election officials broadly oppose hand-counting ballots as an alternative because the practice is time-consuming and prone to errors.

If Trump’s plan ever comes to fruition, it could hit taxpayers hard. Outfitting every state with new machines could cost $1 billion or more.

“It will create chaos in the states, and it seems almost designed to create chaos,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research.

The U.S. House has passed a bill that voting rights groups have repeatedly warned would make it harder for millions of Americans, including married women, to vote.

The Republican-controlled House on Thursday voted for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The legislation purportedly aims to block non-citizens from voting, which is already illegal and is very rare.

The bill would require an individual to present in person a passport, birth certificate or other citizenship document when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information.

Voting rights groups have said the bill will pose a barrier for millions of American women and others who have changed their legal name because of marriage, assimilation or to better align with their gender identity. An estimated 69 million American women and 4 million men do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic officials in 19 states filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s attempt to reshape elections across the U.S., calling it an unconstitutional invasion of states’ clear authority to run their own elections.

Thursday’s lawsuit is the fourth against the executive order issued just a week ago. It seeks to block key aspects of it, including new requirements that people provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a demand that all mail ballots be received by Election Day.

“The President has no power to do any of this,” the state attorneys general wrote in court documents. “The Elections EO is unconstitutional, antidemocratic, and un-American.”

White House spokesperson Harrison Fields responded to the lawsuit Friday, calling the proof-of-citizenship requirements “common sense” and objections from Democrats “insane.”

“The Trump administration is standing up for free, fair, and honest elections and asking this basic question is essential to our Constitutional Republic,” he said in a statement.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic officials in 19 states filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s attempt to reshape elections across the U.S., calling it an unconstitutional invasion of states’ clear authority to run their own elections.

Thursday’s lawsuit is the fourth against the executive order issued just a week ago. It seeks to block key aspects of it, including new requirements that people provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a demand that all mail ballots be received by Election Day.

“The President has no power to do any of this,” the state attorneys general wrote in court documents. “The Elections EO is unconstitutional, antidemocratic, and un-American.”

White House spokesperson Harrison Fields responded to the lawsuit Friday, calling the proof-of-citizenship requirements “common sense” and objections from Democrats “insane.”

“The Trump administration is standing up for free, fair, and honest elections and asking this basic question is essential to our Constitutional Republic,” he said in a statement.

The House of Representatives is expected to vote soon on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, a Republican-backed bill that would reshape the federal elections process.

Known as the SAVE Act, the proposed legislation would tighten voter registration requirements by mandating proof of citizenship for federal elections.

The bill was scheduled for a vote in early April, but on April 1, Speaker Mike Johnson canceled remaining votes for the week — pushing the timeline back.

Republicans argue the legislation will safeguard elections by ensuring non-citizens cannot vote — something President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed is a major problem.

But elections experts say that non-citizen voting — which is already criminalized — is “vanishingly rare.” And they caution the bill will instead make voting more burdensome for American citizens, particularly married women and rural residents.

“The practical difficulties that this act would entail if it were passed aren’t small, even if the concept sounds unremarkable,” Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School, told McClatchy News.

Here’s what to know about the SAVE Act.

Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups are pushing a revised and expanded Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Florida Voting Rights Act, including permanent vote-by-mail requests and other provisions which Republicans will surely reject.

Florida House Representative LaVon Bracy Davis, an Orlando Democrat, and State Senator Tracie Davis, a Jacksonville Democrat, recently announced the filing of the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Florida Voting Rights Act (HB 1409, SB 1582). Senator Davis will proudly carry this legislation during the 2025 legislative session in honor of her friend and colleague, Senator Geraldine Thompson, who tragically passed away in February.

The Democrats say the landmark legislation will position Florida as a voter-friendly state – ensuring the registration and voting process for Floridians before, during, and after they fulfill their civic duty at the ballot box is accessible and straightforward.

he first months of the new Trump administration have been dizzying with the breadth of executive actions to slash the social safety net, further enrich the wealthy, and inflame division based on outdated notions about culture and identity. While White House policy pronouncements have come with flair and political theater – such as the president signing orders on a Jumbotron – in Congress there are quieter but equally pernicious efforts aimed at silencing the votes and voices of communities across the country.

One such piece of legislation is the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or Save Act, which would require Americans seeking to register or re-register to vote to prove US citizenship. This dangerous bill would in effect strip millions of Americans of their access to the vote, while making the voting process more difficult and burdensome for everyone else. Rather than make our elections more secure, the Save Act would disenfranchise millions based on nothing but a series of debunked conspiracy theories.

WASHINGTON (AP) — With the stroke of his pen, President Donald Trumprestructured the way Americans can register to vote and when they can cast their ballots. Or did he?

After the president signed his executive order Tuesday calling for broad election changes, such as proof of citizenship for voter registration and an Election Day return deadline for mailed ballots, election officials, state attorneys general and legal experts said it would face legal challenges for encroaching on state powers outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

The order is “unlawful,” Colorado Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a statement.

“This cannot be done through executive action,” said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research.

New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin said he expects his and other states will challenge the executive order, just as they have several other of Trump’s actions. He said he’s never seen a president threaten the integrity of state election rules like Trump did through his order.

A super PAC tied to billionaire Elon Musk has started spending in two deeply Republican House seats in Florida ahead of next week’s special elections, according to a new campaign finance report. 

America PAC, which has not filed a financial disclosure form yet this year but was almost entirely funded by Musk last year, is spending $20,000 on “texting services” to boost Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis in the 1st Congressional District and state Sen. Randy Fine in the 6th District, according to a report filed with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday night, which was first reported by The New York Times.

America PAC’s spending in the special elections is minimal so far compared with the millions of dollars that have already been spent there. But it is a sign that Musk may be paying attention to the contests, as he continues to ramp up his political engagement while he serves as a key White House adviser. America PAC has also spent millions of dollars on next week’s state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin.  

Tuesday’s special elections in Florida are taking place in deeply Republican territory. President Donald Trump carried the 1st District by 37 points in November and the 6th District by 30 points, according to election result calculations from the NBC News Decision Desk.

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a sweeping executive action to overhaul elections in the U.S., including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and demanding that all ballots be received by Election Day.

The order says the U.S. has failed “to enforce basic and necessary election protections” and calls on states to work with federal agencies to share voter lists and prosecute election crimes. It threatens to pull federal funding from states where election officials don’t comply.

The move, which is likely to face swift challenges because states have broad authority to set their own election rules, is consistent with Trump’s long history of railing against election processes. He often claims elections are being rigged, even before the results are known, and has waged battles against certain voting methods since he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden and falsely blamed it on widespread fraud.

Trump has focused particularly on mail voting, arguing without evidence that it’s insecure and invites fraud even as he has shifted his position on the issue given its popularity with voters, including Republicans. While fraud occurs, it’s rare, limited in scope and gets prosecuted.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Dozens of demonstrators rallied outside the state attorney’s office Saturday afternoon, calling on State Attorney Melissa Nelson to reopen the case against the 18-year-old accused of threatening voters with a machete in October.

Three months after the incident outside a Neptune Beach polling location, the state attorney’s office decided not to prosecute 18-year-old Caleb Williams. 

Now, Jacksonville advocacy groups and community activists have made it known loud and clear that they want Williams held accountable.

“Voter intimidation is still here, and we want it to stop,” said Northside Coalition of Jacksonville President Kelly Frazier. “It’s 2025 now, and we don’t want to hear more episodes of this.” 

On Oct. 29, Williams was arrested and charged with voter intimidation and suppression and aggravated assault for brandishing a machete outside a Neptune Beach polling location and targeting a 71-year-old and a 54-year-old woman, the Neptune Beach Police Department said. 

Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and student activist, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Saturday not for criminal activity, but for things he said. If President Donald Trump gets away with deporting him, as he intends, the danger is that more legal immigrants — possibly U.S. citizens as well — will be punished for exercising their First Amendment freedoms.

A 30-year-old Palestinian raised in Syria, Khalil came to the United States on a student visa in 2022 to pursue a master’s in public administration at Columbia University. He became a high-profile leader of the pro-Palestinian, antiwar movement on campus and attracted the ire of pro-Israel activists — some of whom called for his deportation last week.

On Monday, Trump, who campaigned against campus protests such as the ones that gripped Columbia last spring, bragged about Khalil’s detainment, warning on Truth Social that “this is the first arrest of many to come.”

However, Khalil has not been charged with a crime, and there has been no evidence suggesting he was involved in terrorism.

The U.S. House may soon vote on a bill with a seemingly innocuous name — the SAVE Act, as in “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.”

It is anything but innocuous — especially for the millions of Americans who could find themselves prevented from registering to vote if the SAVE Act is passed.

Ostensibly, the SAVE Act is aimed at preventing people who are in the country illegally from voting in U.S. elections — something that is so rare as to be nearly non-existent.

What its Republican sponsors don’t tell you is that the SAVE Act, with its requirement that people show proof of citizenship, could end up disenfranchising millions of Americans who are and always have been legal citizens of this country.

“It all sounds so reasonable,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio and a longtime advocate of voter rights. “But it has the potential to prevent so many people from registering to vote, through no fault of their own.”

Given the volume and magnitude of actions taken by the White House since Inauguration Day, it is understandable that most of America’s attention has been focused on the executive branch. What should not be lost in this flurry of activity, however, is legislation being advanced by the 119th Congress that could be just as consequential to the institution most fundamental in a representative democracy: the vote.  

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or the SAVE Act, would require individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. It passed in the House in July of 2024 but did not advance in the Senate. Recently reintroduced by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, the bill now has a heightened chance of success given partisan unity within government.  

The consequences of the SAVE Act belie its name by compromising access to the ballot for large swaths of the populace and complicating an already overly complicated process. Moreover, the act undermines the ideals of the “democratic experiment” begun nearly 250 years ago of a republican form of government — an experiment that, until recently, has trended toward expanding rather than restricting suffrage. 

After a cycle that delivered them full power in Washington, Republicans are still pushing to change federal election law — and some Democrats are sounding a renewed alarm.

A proposal that aims to bar noncitizens from voting could disenfranchise millions of American women and serve a larger strategy, Rep. Delia Ramirez argued Tuesday.

“The SAVE act is not an election security bill,” said the Illinois Democrat at a House Administration Committee member day hearing. “It’s part of an authoritarian playbook, including the funding freeze and the persecution of diverse cities, and it takes courage and moral clarity to stand against it.”

The legislation — known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act — was marked up by the committee last Congress and passed the House, before fizzling in the Senate. It would require American voters to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and Democrats have lambasted the bill’s limitations on acceptable forms of identification, which they say would make it difficult for married women who have changed their last names to register to vote.

At a recent town hall in the exurbs of Atlanta, Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., faced a torrent of criticism from a woman who accused him of sponsoring legislation that would make it more difficult for married women like her to vote.  

She was talking about the Republican-backed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE Act. Clips of the town hall, where the woman told McCormick the bill was “voter suppression,” have since gone viral on social media.

If enacted, the proposed law would require people to present proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, when they register to vote in federal elections. It’s designed to keep undocumented immigrants from voting, though it is already illegal and exceedingly rare for noncitizens to do so.

The bill was first introduced last year by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas. It passed the Republican House but was never taken up for a vote in the closely divided Senate. Roy reintroduced the bill in January and, though it is likely to pass the House, it will again face an uphill battle in the Senate, where a handful of Democrats would need to support the measure.  

The SAVE Act is back, and it’s dangerous for democracy.

Unlike 2023, when the first national voter suppression law never reached Joe Biden’s desk, this version of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act is on a fast track to Donald Trump.

If it passes, millions of married and divorced women  — Republican, independent and Democrat alike — will not be able to vote in federal elections.

All voters would face new hurdles. But birth certificate names are a key to this bill, and only one voting segment routinely changes their birth name: married women.

Under the SAVE Act (H.R. 22), people who register to vote or update their registration, even for something as minor as a change of address, will have to confirm their citizenship.

For most, that would require producing either a birth certificate or a passport.

However, roughly eight in 10 women take their husband’s surname when they marry, and many who divorce keep that name. As a result, their birth certificate name will not match their legal name.

The bill has nothing to say about citizens whose current legal name doesn’t match their birth name.

After initiatives to protect abortion rights and legalize marijuana failed in November, Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith filed a joint resolution to make it easier for voters to pass future constitutional amendments.

Under SJR 864, the threshold for ballot initiatives to pass would get lowered from 60% to 50%.

“We deserve a fair, democratic process for amending Florida’s constitution, but politicians + special interests put their thumb on the scale, blocking citizen-led initiatives to protect the status quo,” Smith, an Orlando Democrat, said on X.

The pro-abortion rights Amendment 4 initiative captured 57% of the vote, just short of the 60% supermajority to pass. Amendment 3 to legalize marijuana also failed with about 56% of the vote.

Smith is unlikely to make much progress in a Republican-controlled Legislature since it was Republicans who supported raising the bar to 60% in the first place.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, in fact, has recently pushed for making changes that would make it more difficult for citizen-led groups, like the abortion rights initiative, to get on the ballot

Federal Judges are allowing a legal challenge to South Florida’s congressional and Florida House districts to move forward.

But the three-Judge panel also said plaintiffs were only allowed to continue a challenge against eight of 10 districts originally called out in federal complaints.

The lawsuit ironically alleges the same motivations behind the cartography that Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed motivated him to veto a congressional map (P 0109) approved by the Legislature before his office submitted the map, which has been in place since 2022.

The lawsuit said Florida’s 26th, 27th and 28th Congressional Districts were all drawn motivated primarily by race. Notably, all three districts are currently represented by Republican Cuban Americans: U.S. Reps. Mario Díaz-Balartof Hialeah, María Elvira Salazar of Coral Gables and Carlos Giménez of Miami-Dade, respectively.

The courts only will allow a legal challenge to CD 26, Díaz-Balart’s district. That notably spans from Immokalee in Collier County to Hialeah and Miami Beach in north Miami-Dade County.

As Florida enters a new election cycle, it’s essential to prioritize voter education.

As of Jan. 1, Florida’s vote-by-mail (VBM) rolls were officially reset under a relatively new law.

When in the past, voters who requested mail-in ballots in previous election cycles did not have to request them again for the following two election cycles, this law requires voters to formally request mail-in ballots after every federal election cycle. Therefore, all standing requests after the 2024 Elections have now been wiped out. The impact of this change has been immediate and staggering, with the number of voters set to receive mail-in ballots plunging to record lows.

In 2024 alone, more than 3 million Florida voters voted by mail out of over 3.5 million Florida voters who had requested a mail ballot. That number will now reset, and every voter wishing to vote by mail in elections this year must make sure they request their ballot ahead of the applicable deadline. The implications are even more concerning with two congressional Special Elections scheduled for April 1. Voter turnout is at risk, particularly in a state where mail-in ballots have historically been a welcome resource.

Proponents of the VBM reset justified the change as necessary to combat voter fraud and enhance security around our elections. They framed the policy as a proactive step to secure Florida’s elections despite the absence of any significant evidence of widespread mail-in ballot fraud in the state.ogress.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act could prevent many married women from being able to register to vote.

The act, reintroduced by Texas Republican Representative Chip Roy, is intended to amend the National Voter Registration Act to ensure that all people registering to vote are U.S. citizens. It would require people to present in-person documentation as proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

Much of the documentation listed under the SAVE Act is based on having a birth certificate that matches the person registering to vote. However, as many as 69 million married women in the United States have changed their legal name since getting married, meaning their name does not match their birth certificate, per the Center for American Progress.

The United States is a democracy, meaning all citizens, with the exception of children and some felons, have the right to vote. The SAVE Act would make it significantly harder for married women, as well as many other members of the population, to exercise their right to vote as Americans.

In the months before last year’s election, Alabama removed valid voters from the rolls after wrongly tagging them as noncitizens. Tennessee’s secretary of state told 14,000 voters they had to prove their citizenship. And officials debated whether hundreds of thousands of Arizonans could vote in state races after they discovered they were missing citizenship documentation.

More episodes like those are likely to lie ahead throughout the country.

Republicans in Congress and state legislatures are charging forward with plans to require Americans to prove they are citizens as they say they seek to crack down on noncitizen voting — an almost nonexistent problem.

Voting by noncitizens is already illegal in all state and federal elections, and requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship could make it harder for millions of legitimate voters to cast ballots. Driver’s licenses and other state IDs can be used only for people who provided proof of citizenship to get those IDs, so some people will need to track down other documents.

Many people do not have ready access to birth certificates or passports, including women who changed their names when they got married, rural residents who live far from government offices where birth records are kept, and people who lost documents in fires or floods.

Legislative Republicans have clashed with Gov. Ron DeSantis over how best to complement President Donald Trump’s campaign against undocumented immigration, but will they resist the governor’s other priorities?

Take his reforms to Florida’s citizen initiative process.

Three months after he successfully organized enough opposition to stop proposed constitutional amendments to legalize adult use of cannabis and enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution, the governor wants to change the citizen petition process to address what he calls “ballot initiative integrity.”

Among those proposals are eliminating third-party collection of petition forms and tightening signature verification, changes that voting rights advocates say could gut the citizen initiative process.

That appears a political loser, however — even among Florida Republicans.

A survey of 600 likely 2026 Republican voters by Fabrizio & Associates, the pollster for Donald Trump, shows that rank-and-file GOP voters do not approve. The poll was first published in Florida Politics.

When asked whether they support eliminating “the ability for supporters of constitutional initiatives to collect petitions signed by Floridians in order to get the initiative on the ballot, and making it almost impossible for citizens to vote on changes to Florida’s constitution,” 55% of Republicans said they did not, with just 17% supporting the idea.

President Trump began his pledge to give America a MAGA makeover Monday, taking a slew of executive actions to walk back Biden-era policies and fulfill bold campaign promises.

The big picture: Trump’s radical expansion of executive power will dramatically change life for millions of people if the orders withstand the barrage of legal challenges that are already coming.

President Trump executive orders list 2025

What Trump’s Day 1 executive orders do…

Immigration executive orders

Many of Trump’s first orders curtail immigration at the southern border.

• He promised mass deportations but hasn’t detailed how he would implement, staff and fund such a massive, costly operation.

Trump declares national emergency at Mexico border

Trump declared an emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, vowing to deploy troops to the region, including the National Guard. He also instructed the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security to construct additional border barriers.

• Trump designated “certain international cartels” and organizations, such as Tren de Aragua and MS-13, as foreign terrorist organizations and announced plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target them.

Two days after Florida’s GOP legislative leaders said that they were not aware of any specific guidance from Donald Trump about his plans to combat illegal immigration, Gov. Ron DeSantis responded Wednesday with a detailed list of proposals he expects the Legislature to approve when it convenes in the special session he has called for later this month.

“We are not approaching the new administration in a lackadaisical fashion,” DeSantis said during a press conference at the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. “We in Florida have a sense of urgency to accomplish this mission, and the mission is very simple. We need to end the illegal immigration crisis once and for all in these United States of America.”

The proposals he said he wants the Legislature to pass during the special session he called for Jan. 27 include:

• Require that city, county, and state law enforcement officers have “maximum” participation in any program to assist the federal government in enforcing federal immigration laws.
• Enact criminal penalties for illegal entry under state law.
• Appoint a state immigration enforcement officer to coordinate with federal authorities.
• Empower local authorities to detain and deport undocumented immigrants.
• Broaden the legal definition of “gang-related activities” so that it includes undocumented immigrants.
• Education and voting reform to discourage undocumented immigrants.
• Tightening voter registration laws to ensure that only Florida citizens can legally vote.
• Increase penalties for undocumented immigrants who commit voter fraud.
• Impose ID verification for foreign remittances.
• Bail and flight risk presumptions when undocumented are brought up on charges.
• Repeal the 2014 law allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates to Florida colleges and universities.

For Donald Trump and his supporters, concerns about election administration quickly dissipated once it became clear he would win the 2024 presidential election, and in surveys since, most Republican voters say the election was run well.

But for the wing of the Republican Party that has been pushing sweeping election reform since the 2020 contest, the work continues.

On Jan. 3, the day the new Republican-led Congress was sworn in, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, reintroduced legislation aimed at stopping noncitizens from voting in federal elections — something that is already illegal and which research has universally shown rarely happens.

The bill, dubbed the SAVE Act, would add new proof-of-citizenship requirements to voter registration that experts say could disenfranchise scores of eligible voters.

It was one of the first bills introduced in the 119th Congress, a sign that what supporters call election integrity policy remains a key part of the GOP agenda, even after Trump’s win.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Thursday accusing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of failing to fulfill his constitutional obligation to call special elections for two seats in the state House and Senate.

The seats in question were vacated in November by state Rep. Joel Rudman and state Sen. Randy Fine, who resigned to run for two congressional seats that opened up when President-elect Donald Trump named U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz and Mike Waltz as Cabinet picks. 

Shortly after Gaetz and Waltz resigned, DeSantis called for special congressional elections with a Jan. 28 primary and an April 1 general. He has yet to set elections for the state-level openings, however. 

“I don’t understand why the governor resists calling special elections in a timely manner. From Jeb Bush to Rick Scott, past governors moved quickly to ensure the people retained their voice in government. DeSantis’s refusal to do so is both troubling and illegal,” said Nicholas Warren, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Florida.

Donald Trump could use a second term atop the justice department to gut enforcement of US federal voting laws and deploy an agency that is supposed to protect the right to vote to undermine it, experts have warned.

Trump has made no secret of his intention to punish his political enemies and subvert the American voting system. His control of the justice department could allow him to amplify misleading claims of voter fraud by non-citizens and others, as well as investigate local election officials.

It could also cause the department’s voting section to largely scale back its enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, returning it to the approach that it took under Trump’s first term.

Trump’s pick to lead the department could give an indication of its future direction. Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, assisted Trump’s efforts to try to overturn the 2020 election results, echoing false claims of fraud. Trump has also picked Harmeet Dhilon, a staunch loyalist who supported his effort to overturn the 2020 election, to lead the civil rights division at the department. Her law firm has also been involved in several cases arguing in favor of voting restrictions.

Donald Trump could use a second term atop the justice department to gut enforcement of US federal voting laws and deploy an agency that is supposed to protect the right to vote to undermine it, experts have warned.

Trump has made no secret of his intention to punish his political enemies and subvert the American voting system. His control of the justice department could allow him to amplify misleading claims of voter fraud by non-citizens and others, as well as investigate local election officials.

It could also cause the department’s voting section to largely scale back its enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, returning it to the approach that it took under Trump’s first term.

Trump’s pick to lead the department could give an indication of its future direction. Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, assisted Trump’s efforts to try to overturn the 2020 election results, echoing false claims of fraud. Trump has also picked Harmeet Dhilon, a staunch loyalist who supported his effort to overturn the 2020 election, to lead the civil rights division at the department. Her law firm has also been involved in several cases arguing in favor of voting restrictions.

Most of the U.S. holds its major primary and general elections in even-numbered years, but there are a handful of places where competitive congressional, state and local-level contests will be happening in 2025.

Here are the races that The Associated Press will be tracking this year:

January 

January 7: Virginia holds a special general election to fill two legislative seats, state Senate District and state House District 26. Both seats, which opened up after their current occupants won congressional races, have been spotlighted by national Democrats.

February 

February 18: Wisconsin holds primary elections for a seat on the state Supreme Court and the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction.

April

April 1: Florida holds two special elections for U.S. House seats. The 1st District — considered a safe Republican seat — is vacant following the resignation of former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who was nominated by President-elect Donald Trump as attorney general but later withdrew. Former Rep. Mike Waltz resigned from the 6th District after Trump appointed him to serve as national security adviser.

Also on April 1, Wisconsin holds general elections for a seat on the state Supreme Court and the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Prominent voting rights activist Dr. Desmond Meade was honored Friday with a street renaming ceremony in his honor. A portion of Southwest 268th Street in south Miami-Dade County, or Moody Drive, will now be known as “Desmond Meade Street.”

The street now named after him holds personal significance for Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC). It is that very street that he grew up near as a young man struggling with addiction and homelessness.

“I walked this street as a drug addict, and today, I walk it with pride, knowing that it now stands as a beacon of hope for those who need it most,” Meade shared in his remarks during the Dec. 6 ceremony in Naranja. “This street sign is not just for me — it’s for everyone who has ever felt they didn’t have a second chance.”

Meade’s journey is one of resilience. Shortly after graduating high school, he joined the United States Army, where he served as a helicopter mechanic. As a returning citizen, he faced drug addiction, homelessness and incarceration. Meade was living in a homeless shelter when he decided to enroll in Miami-Dade College, where he graduated with honors in 2010. He then went on to earn his law degree from the Florida International University College of Law, graduating in 2013.

With its six-justice conservative supermajority, the Supreme Court has made a sharp right pivot in recent years, eliminating federal abortion rights, certain gun restrictions, and protections for the administrative state while also expanding executive power. To help you keep track of what’s happening this term, we’ll be periodically rounding up the biggest developments in Keeping Up With the Supreme Court. 

Purging Voter Rolls Right Before an Election Is Now Legal—Maybe

The court has had a sleepy start to its new term, as it seemed to keep heavy cases off of the docket in anticipation of postelection litigation that never materialized because Donald Trump won decisively. Still, there were some noteworthy developments: Less than a week before the election, the high court issued an order in Beals v. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights that is sure to influence future U.S. elections and inspire some states to push the boundaries of voter suppression.

This case went through the shadow docket, which means that while the justices sided with the state of Virginia, they did not provide a written explanation of their decision. (The three liberals did note their dissent, so we can assume it was a 6–3 split.) The ruling seems to fly in the face of the National Voter Registration Act, which explicitly prohibits the systematic removal of ineligible voters from official lists starting 90 days before a federal election. This is pretty much exactly what Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin did with his eleventh-hour executive order that mandated Virginia election officials use data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to identify and cancel voter registrations of residents suspected of being noncitizens, unless the resident could verify their citizenship within 14 days. The Biden administration, along with civic and immigrant rights groups, challenged the order in federal court—and in late October, a district court judge sided with them.

With its six-justice conservative supermajority, the Supreme Court has made a sharp right pivot in recent years, eliminating federal abortion rights, certain gun restrictions, and protections for the administrative state while also expanding executive power. To help you keep track of what’s happening this term, we’ll be periodically rounding up the biggest developments in Keeping Up With the Supreme Court. 

Purging Voter Rolls Right Before an Election Is Now Legal—Maybe

The court has had a sleepy start to its new term, as it seemed to keep heavy cases off of the docket in anticipation of postelection litigation that never materialized because Donald Trump won decisively. Still, there were some noteworthy developments: Less than a week before the election, the high court issued an order in Beals v. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights that is sure to influence future U.S. elections and inspire some states to push the boundaries of voter suppression.

This case went through the shadow docket, which means that while the justices sided with the state of Virginia, they did not provide a written explanation of their decision. (The three liberals did note their dissent, so we can assume it was a 6–3 split.) The ruling seems to fly in the face of the National Voter Registration Act, which explicitly prohibits the systematic removal of ineligible voters from official lists starting 90 days before a federal election. This is pretty much exactly what Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin did with his eleventh-hour executive order that mandated Virginia election officials use data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to identify and cancel voter registrations of residents suspected of being noncitizens, unless the resident could verify their citizenship within 14 days. The Biden administration, along with civic and immigrant rights groups, challenged the order in federal court—and in late October, a district court judge sided with them.

Dear President Biden, 

On behalf of the 128 undersigned civil liberties, civil and human rights, faith-based, academic, and social justice organizations, we write to urge you to use your constitutionally provided power to commute the sentences of all individuals on federal death row. We commend your administration’s actions to repudiate capital punishment, including imposing a moratorium on executions for those sentenced to death, and for publicly calling for an end to the use of the death penalty during your 2020 campaign.¹ In the face of a second Trump administration, more is necessary. 

Forty people are currently on federal death row. Over half of those individuals are non-white, including 38% who are Black, despite Black adults representing 11.7% of the population.² The federal death penalty is not immune from the hallmark irreparable failures of the death penalty at the state level.³ Indeed, the nation bore witness to thirteen executions in the final seven months of the first Trump administration, all of which were marred with devastating issues endemic to capital punishment like racial bias, ineffective legal assistance, unreliable forensic evidence, and defendants executed who had substantial intellectual disabilities and severe mental health conditions.⁴ 

With its six-justice conservative supermajority, the Supreme Court has made a sharp right pivot in recent years, eliminating federal abortion rights, certain gun restrictions, and protections for the administrative state while also expanding executive power. To help you keep track of what’s happening this term, we’ll be periodically rounding up the biggest developments in Keeping Up With the Supreme Court. 

Purging Voter Rolls Right Before an Election Is Now Legal—Maybe

The court has had a sleepy start to its new term, as it seemed to keep heavy cases off of the docket in anticipation of postelection litigation that never materialized because Donald Trump won decisively. Still, there were some noteworthy developments: Less than a week before the election, the high court issued an order in Beals v. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights that is sure to influence future U.S. elections and inspire some states to push the boundaries of voter suppression.

This case went through the shadow docket, which means that while the justices sided with the state of Virginia, they did not provide a written explanation of their decision. (The three liberals did note their dissent, so we can assume it was a 6–3 split.) The ruling seems to fly in the face of the National Voter Registration Act, which explicitly prohibits the systematic removal of ineligible voters from official lists starting 90 days before a federal election. This is pretty much exactly what Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin did with his eleventh-hour executive order that mandated Virginia election officials use data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to identify and cancel voter registrations of residents suspected of being noncitizens, unless the resident could verify their citizenship within 14 days. The Biden administration, along with civic and immigrant rights groups, challenged the order in federal court—and in late October, a district court judge sided with them.

The U.S. Postal Service said Monday nearly 100% of completed mail ballots were returned to election offices within a week for this year’s presidential contest, despite hurricanes, some misdirected election mail and delivery concerns raised by state officials.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said postal workers processed more than 99 million general election ballots — making extra deliveries and collections and working to identify problems that could lead to incorrect deliveries. They also ensured ballots were delivered even after hurricanes brought devastation to parts of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina just weeks before Election Day, he said.

Almost 99.9% of general election mail ballots were delivered to election officials within a week and 97.7% of them were delivered within three days, postal officials said. The three-day return rate was similar to 2020 but slightly lower than the rate during the 2022 mid-term elections.

There were some notable problems even with the overall strong performance.

Election offices in California, Montana, Louisiana, New Mexico and elsewhere reported receiving completed ballots in the mail that should have gone to other states. The California Secretary of State’s office, for example, said about 150 mail ballots from Oregon voters were misdirected to California before being sent back. The Postal Service report did not address those issues.

Ballots can’t get sick, but after an election many voters need to “cure” their ballots to make sure they get counted. If you voted by absentee or provisional ballot, election officials will inspect it to make sure it has all the necessary information − and they often find it doesn’t.

For example, a state election worker might find the signature on an absentee ballot doesn’t match the one the election office has on file. A voter who shows up the polls without the proper photo ID may fill out a provisional ballot that won’t be counted until you present the right ID to the elections office.

In the closely watched swing state of Nevada, on the Monday before the election, there were nearly 14,000 ballots that required signature cures, according to the office of Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar. In the county that surrounds Albequerque, New Mexico, hundreds of ballots were rejected, according to a local news station.

“It’s critically important that voters be aware of the potential need to cure their ballots, to make sure their voices are heard and votes are counted,” Aguilar said in a news release. “This is especially important for young voters who may not have a practiced signature or older voters whose signatures have changed over time.”

Ballots can’t get sick, but after an election many voters need to “cure” their ballots to make sure they get counted. If you voted by absentee or provisional ballot, election officials will inspect it to make sure it has all the necessary information − and they often find it doesn’t.

For example, a state election worker might find the signature on an absentee ballot doesn’t match the one the election office has on file. A voter who shows up the polls without the proper photo ID may fill out a provisional ballot that won’t be counted until you present the right ID to the elections office.

In the closely watched swing state of Nevada, on the Monday before the election, there were nearly 14,000 ballots that required signature cures, according to the office of Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar. In the county that surrounds Albequerque, New Mexico, hundreds of ballots were rejected, according to a local news station.

“It’s critically important that voters be aware of the potential need to cure their ballots, to make sure their voices are heard and votes are counted,” Aguilar said in a news release. “This is especially important for young voters who may not have a practiced signature or older voters whose signatures have changed over time.”

A remarkable thing happened Tuesday night on an “election integrity” discussion page on the social media platform X, as it became clear that former president Donald Trump was headed to a decisive victory against Vice President Kamala Harris.

It got quiet.

Created by X owner Elon Musk’s America PAC, the page had provided a platform viewed by millions of users for rapid-fire updates about power outages causing poll closures, Russia-linked bomb threats and unsubstantiated accusations that run-of-the mill voting problems were the work of devious Democrats trying to steal the election.

Around midnight, however, interest in the forum plummeted. With Trump winning back the White House, the urgency to investigate wrongdoing subsided. In its place came a spike of self-congratulation as those who believe Joe Biden’s 2020 victory was riddled with fraud took credit for preventing similar corruption this year.

Election Day was relatively tame around the country, though it was marred by a string of bomb threats against polling places in swing states that law enforcement officials linked to Russia. The threats forced some temporary evacuations and extensions of polling place hours.

Election officials, braced for disruptions and, forewarned by intelligence officials that foreign adversaries would attempt to create problems, responded quickly to reassure voters and minimize interruptions to voting.

In Georgia, Secretary Brad Raffensperger said “noncredible” bomb threats targeted polling places in the Democratic strongholds of Fulton, Gwinnett, and DeKalb counties, forcing an extension of hours at multiple voting sites. In Arizona, a threat forced the evacuation of the election office in La Paz County and targeted polling places in Navajo County. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said voters were safe. “No one is under threat as we know it right now,” Fontes said at a press conference. There were also bomb threats in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

In a statement, the FBI said it was aware of the threats, “many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains. None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 5, 2024

Florida’s Voter Information Lookup Website Has Crashed, and Many County Information Lookup Sites are Also Down

FLORIDA – The Florida Election Protection Coalition is alerting the media and voters about today’s failure of the state of Florida Division of Elections to provide critical voting information for voters who are seeking to cast their votes today, Election Day, and an alternative solution for voters.

While this does not affect the vote count or tabulation, this does affect voters’ ability to access the ballot. Voters can call their county Supervisor of Elections office to find out information about their registration status or Election Day polling location.

Abdelilah Skhir, senior strategist, ACLU of Florida:

“On the last day to vote in the 2024 General Election, the Florida Division of Elections voter lookup tool is down. The state must make it a priority to correct this issue. Thousands of voters are looking up their voter information and planning where to vote – this is a delay that interrupts their ability to cast their ballot. With hours left until the polls close, we must ensure that every eligible voter in Florida can participate in the democratic process.”

Amy Keith, executive director of Common Cause Florida:

“It is urgent for voters to be able to find the information they need to vote today. While these websites are down, voters should call their county supervisor of elections office on the phone to get the information they need before they go vote.”

Voters experiencing look-up tool issues should contact their county Supervisor of Elections. Voters can find the phone number for their supervisor of elections at this website.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Abdelilah (Ab-Dee-Lah) Skhir, ACLU of Florida, 786-363-1660

Jennifer Garcia, Common Cause, jgarcia@commoncause.org, 727-717-2308

The Justice Department on Friday said it will send election monitors to 86 jurisdictions in 27 states on Tuesday, the most in two decades amid growing fears of improper partisan influence and voter suppression.

The announcement comes as officials in some Republican-led states have warned they might attempt to ban federal authorities from entering polling sites on Election Day. They have cast such oversight as partisan meddling from the Biden administration, even though Democratic and Republican administrations have monitored elections for potential voting rights irregularities for decades.

The number of jurisdictions subject to in-person federal scrutiny this year represents a 49 percent increase from 2020. It matches the total in 2004, the first presidential election cycle after the Supreme Court helped decide the fiercely disputed 2000 contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

All seven of the nation’s most closely contested swing states are represented on the list, with monitors planning to visit six counties in Michigan, five in Georgia, four each in Wisconsin and Arizona, three each in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and one in Nevada.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge who recently chastised Florida officials for “trampling” on free speech rights continued to block the head of the state’s health department from taking any more steps to threaten TV stations that air commercials for an abortion rights measure on next week’s ballot.

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker extended a temporary restraining order, siding with Floridians Defending Freedom, the group that created the ads promoting the ballot question that would add abortion rights to the state constitution if it passes Nov. 5.

Walker handed down the decision from the bench after hearing arguments from attorneys for the campaign and state officials. The order extends a previous one that bars State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo from taking any further action to coerce or intimidate broadcasters that run the commercials.

Walker said extending the temporary restraining order will give him more time to rule on the preliminary injunction that the abortion rights campaign is requesting. The order will run through Election Day and expire on Nov. 12, unless the judge rules before then.

TALLAHASSEE — The Florida Supreme Court could decide a legal dispute stemming from a high-profile move by Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state officials in 2022 to target alleged voter fraud by convicted felons.

Defense attorneys filed a notice Wednesday that is a first step in asking the Supreme Court to decide whether charges should proceed against Terry Hubbard, who was one of 20 convicted felons accused of registering and voting when ineligible.

Charges against the convicted felons were announced in August 2022, less than three months before a general election that included DeSantis winning another term. DeSantis and other Republican leaders in recent years have made a major issue of trying to stop what they say is voter fraud.

The dispute in the Hubbard case centers on whether the statewide prosecutor’s office had authority to file charges against him. A Broward County circuit judge dismissed the case because he said the alleged wrongdoing occurred in one judicial circuit and that the statewide prosecutor only had jurisdiction in cases involving multiple circuits.

But a panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal in July overturned that ruling and said charges against Hubbard should move forward.

With voting underway in the 2024 presidential race, majorities of American voters are at least somewhat confident that the election will be run smoothly, that votes will be counted accurately and that ineligible voters will be prevented from casting ballots.

But supporters of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have sharply different expectations for how this year’s election may unfold. In many cases, these differences are as wide as they were in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

Harris supporters are more optimistic about the way the election will be run: 90% say they are at least somewhat confident that elections across the United States will be administered well. This compares with 57% of Trump supporters who are confident the election will be run smoothly.

This pattern in views extends to other aspects of the presidential race:

• Harris supporters also are more confident that election systems across the U.S. are secure from hacking and other technological threats (73% vs. 32%).
• Harris supporters are more confident than Trump supporters that, after all the votes are counted, it will be clear who won (85% vs. 58%).
• Harris supporters are much more confident that mail-in ballots will be counted as voters intend (85% vs. 38%).

The below-signed organizations write to express our concern about the impact of Hurricane Helene on Floridians’ ability to successfully vote in the 2024 General Election, for which voting by mail has already begun. We appreciate the issuing of Executive Order Number 24-212, which will provide Supervisors of Elections much-needed flexibility in Charlotte, Citrus, Dixie, Hernando, Hillsborough, Lee, Levy, Madison, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, Sarasota, and Taylor Counties. We respectfully urge you to supplement this with additional action as deadlines such as the voter registration deadline rapidly approach. 

The destruction caused by Hurricane Helene has displaced thousands of Floridians and significantly disrupted election administration in affected counties. Unable to return to their homes and struggling to recover, Floridians are forced to navigate and identify alternative means of voting.¹ Election officials in several counties have reported challenges arising from displaced voters and displaced poll workers, as well as damage and disruptions to voting sites and other election infrastructure.² Supervisors of Elections need extended time and flexibility to solve for the widespread damage and displacement as a result of Hurricane Helene.³

In light of the above, we respectfully request that the Governor and Secretary of State take the following emergency actions to ensure voting access for all Floridians.

Nearly 1.2 million Floridians have already voted by mail ahead of Election Day, including more than 300,000 in the Miami metro area alone, according to state and county elections data released as early in-person voting kicked off in most of Florida on Monday morning.

In Miami-Dade County, as of 2 p.m., more than 144,000 voters have already cast their ballots, including almost 124,000 who voted by mail and about 20,000 who went to the polls on Monday, according to the county elections department. Roberto Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the elections department, said that historically, around 500,000 Miami-Dade residents vote early in-person in presidential elections.

In Broward, more than 108,000 residents have already voted, while over 130,000 have cast their ballots in Palm Beach County, according to elections officials. Early voting centers in South Florida will be open seven days a week, closing at 7 p.m. on Nov. 3. Election Day is Nov. 5.

The numbers are the latest sign that election season is well underway in Florida — a longtime battleground state that has largely been written off by both parties in this year’s presidential race as a likely Republican win. Yet Republicans and Democrats are still closely watching how voters will break on two proposed constitutional amendments that, if approved next month, would broadly expand abortion access in Florida and legalize recreational marijuana use for adults.

Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday issued an order allowing voting-related changes in counties hammered by Hurricane Milton, the second time in less than a month flexibility has been given to supervisors of elections because of catastrophic storm damage.

Milton made landfall in Sarasota County last week and caused widespread flooding, spawned dozens of tornadoes and left a wake of destruction as it barrelled across Florida into the Atlantic Ocean.

Milton came about two weeks after Hurricane Helene, which made landfall in Taylor County on Sept. 26 and caused widespread damage along the Gulf Coast.

DeSantis on Thursday issued an executive order allowing supervisors of elections in Milton-affected counties to make changes such as consolidating polling sites and making it easier for displaced voters to obtain mail-in ballots.

The order allows supervisors “to make, you know, reasonable, modest but reasonable, accommodations if they have had damage to any of their voting sites because of the storm, and to be able to ensure that folks have an ability and a place to be able to cast their ballot,” the governor told reporters Thursday during an appearance in Sarasota.

Florida’s ballot initiative process has long been a beacon of direct democracy, a way for everyday Floridians to make their voices heard when politicians fail to represent their values. This process has enabled the public to pass landmark amendments on issues ranging from minimum wage increases to voting rights. 

Amendment 4 – a new constitutional amendment aimed at securing abortion access- underwent a rigorous governmental approval process. But now, the State’s recently created election police force is investigating that same petition process as a tool to attack democracy. The Florida Secretary of State is also pushing highly dubious “fraud” claims while providing no evidence that anything was done wrong. 

The amendment process, which allows citizens to propose changes to the state constitution, is not only legal but a critical part of our democracy. The sheer number of signatures required for an amendment to make it onto the ballot, combined with the hurdles of fundraising and organizing, ensure that only proposals with broad public support even have a chance of success. 

The petition drive for Amendment 4 reflects just such a groundswell of public support. But rather than respecting the will of the people, state officials are using law enforcement to try to quash this effort.

Amid two damaging hurricanes and ongoing recovery looms a major deadline—November 5th. Election Day. That’s when millions of Floridians will cast their votes. But many are facing uncertainty due to storm damage. A clash has been brewing over how best to accommodate displaced voters and those in difficulty due to the storms.

October 7th was the last day to register to vote in the November election. That’s about a week after Hurricane Helene devastated communities in the Big Bend, and just two days before Milton slammed into heavily populated Central Florida. Several voter and civil rights groups called on Gov. Ron DeSantis to extend the state’s voter registration deadline. But he didn’t.

“People can register today and that’s that,” DeSantis said. “There’s nothing inhibiting you registering today. The storm has not hit yet. Now, after the storm, we will see what damage is there, and if I have to do a similar executive order that I did in Ian and that I did for Helene, we’re happy to do it, but we’re not going to change any registration deadline. You can register today and there’s no reason to open that up.” 

DeSantis DID make other accommodations. He’s given supervisors flexibility in terms of when and where they place early voting sites. He suspended a state requirement that mail-in ballot requests be made in signed writing when sent to an address other than the one on file – an important consideration when voters are displaced. He did other things, too.

But Brad Ashwell, Florida state director of All Voting is Local, says it’s not enough.

Amid two damaging hurricanes and ongoing recovery looms a major deadline—November 5th. Election Day. That’s when millions of Floridians will cast their votes. But many are facing uncertainty due to storm damage. A clash has been brewing over how best to accommodate displaced voters and those in difficulty due to the storms.

October 7th was the last day to register to vote in the November election. That’s about a week after Hurricane Helene devastated communities in the Big Bend, and just two days before Milton slammed into heavily populated Central Florida. Several voter and civil rights groups called on Gov. Ron DeSantis to extend the state’s voter registration deadline. But he didn’t.

“People can register today and that’s that,” DeSantis said. “There’s nothing inhibiting you registering today. The storm has not hit yet. Now, after the storm, we will see what damage is there, and if I have to do a similar executive order that I did in Ian and that I did for Helene, we’re happy to do it, but we’re not going to change any registration deadline. You can register today and there’s no reason to open that up.” 

DeSantis DID make other accommodations. He’s given supervisors flexibility in terms of when and where they place early voting sites. He suspended a state requirement that mail-in ballot requests be made in signed writing when sent to an address other than the one on file – an important consideration when voters are displaced. He did other things, too.

But Brad Ashwell, Florida state director of All Voting is Local, says it’s not enough.

A federal judge in Florida rejected an emergency request from The League of Women Voters of Florida and the Florida NAACP to extend the voter registration deadline in the state. 

The groups brought their request as Florida’s registration deadline for the presidential election fell on Monday, between back-to-back hurricanes in the state. On Wednesday night, US District Court Judge Robert Hinkle declined to extend the deadline, saying in a hearing that “the problem is not something that is going to be solved by the court.” 

Hinkle said that voters had ample time to register before Hurricane Helene made landfall in the state’s Big Bend region and added that voters could have still registered while they were preparing for (or fleeing from) Hurricane Milton.

“If they had evacuated, they still could have registered while evacuating if they had a cell phone,” he said.

The petitioners had hoped to extend the deadline by 10 days. Hinkle cited the already charged environment surrounding election integrity in the hearing, saying that election officials didn’t need further pressure in “the most closely watched election ever.” 

Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday that he had no intention of extending the deadline to register to vote in next month’s presidential election, even as voters in a broad swath of Florida have been forced to evacuate their homes because of Hurricane Milton.

“People can register today,” he said on Monday, the deadline to do so. “There’s nothing inhibiting you registering today. The storm has not hit yet.”

The response disappointed Amy Keith, executive director of Common Cause Florida.

“The governor said that there was nothing inhibiting people from registering yesterday, while we had parts of the state under mandatory evacuation orders. We had people in line waiting for gas. We had folks desperately trying to board up their houses and, as I said, really trying to clear out the debris from Hurricane Helene so that it doesn’t get picked up by the winds that are coming from Hurricane Milton,” Keith said on a Zoom call Tuesday.

“It is a very chaotic time on the Florida Gulf Coast and, unfortunately, we’re not getting that support for voters from the state.”

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) – As Floridians and Georgians juggle storm recovery and preparation in the midst of a historically turbulent hurricane season, time is running out for those hoping to register to vote.

Monday is the voter registration deadline for both Florida and Georgia. It means Monday is the last day people in both states can sign up to vote for the next U.S. president and all other races this November.

Anyone who registers after Monday will not be able to vote until after the November election.

Some voting rights groups are worried that the deadline comes at a time when people may not be able to prioritize voter registration.

“People are not focused on getting registered to vote, understandably, and they have not been focused on getting registered to vote for a few weeks now,” said Larry Hannan, the communications director for State Voices Florida.

State Voices Florida and more than a dozen other groups asked Governor Ron DeSantis to “indefinitely delay” the voter registration deadline, leaving more time to register.

The governor declined on Monday morning.

“We’re happy to do it, but we’re not going to change any registration deadline,” the governor said. “You can register (Monday), and there is no reason to open that up.”

Tallahassee, FL – Today is the deadline to register to vote in Florida. But many communities across the state are still struggling to recover from Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton is projected to make landfall Wednesday on the central Gulf Coast. Due to these unique circumstances, a broad coalition of voting rights organizations are calling for the State to indefinitely extend the deadline to register to vote in all Florida counties until Milton has passed and everything has stabilized. 

It is unreasonable to expect people to focus on registering to vote with multiple storms wreaking havoc in Florida. Floridians who are still recovering from Hurricane Helene are today preparing for Milton; they can not and should not be expected to have to meet a voter registration deadline today.  It is unfair to disenfranchise newly arrived Floridians, people who have just reached the legal age to vote, and others who need to register to vote in Florida due to the impacts of natural disasters that are beyond their control. We therefore urge Governor Ron DeSantis, Secretary of State Cord Byrd, and others to pause the deadline. 

Pinellas’ elections supervisor is asking the state to grant her office greater flexibility in managing the upcoming elections as the county works to recover from the damage of Hurricane Helene.

In a Saturday email to Secretary of State Cord Byrd and Division of Elections Director Maria Matthews, Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Julie Marcus wrote that up to 40 polling locations in the county may have sustained “significant damage and could require relocation.”

Marcus said her office is still assessing how early voting locations and mail ballot drop-off sites fared.

She asked the state to issue an executive order giving the county flexibility similar to what she said the state granted after Hurricane Ian in 2022. That includes the authority to relocate or consolidate polling locations less than 30 days before the election and the ability to create additional early voting locations and to extend early voting days, including up to Election Day. She also asked the state to adjust rules on mail ballot drop-off locations and to permit vote-by-mail ballots to be sent to addresses other than the one a voter has on file.

She also asked that the state OK the United States Postal Service to forward mail ballots to voters who are not at the location listed in their voter file, so long as they provide identifying information.