By Barrington Salmon, Florida Phoenix
Apopka's 2026 municipal elections are approximately one year away, assuming the traditional second Tuesday in March schedule is used.
But is Apopka ready?
After a dismal voter turnout in 2024, has anything been done to overcome the downward trend, or did new state laws make it even more difficult to vote?
Journalist Barrington Salmon wrote an OP/ED for the Florida Phoenix about voter suppression in the state, and much of it could apply to Apopka in the next election cycle.
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For years before the 2024 presidential election, Gov. Ron DeSantis and legislative Republicans kept busy carrying out their part of their national party’s agenda to incapacitate parts of the state’s electoral apparatus to dissuade Black and brown voters, young people, seniors, and other Democratic constituencies from voting.
This meant passing a slew of laws that make it considerably harder to vote than was true four years earlier, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Florida is now one of four states that have “used single bills to enact an array of restrictions, imposing limits across the entire voting process,” the center has reported.
Florida is among 11 Republican-dominated legislatures that have impinged on ways the electorate can register to vote while also restricting voter registration drives. According to the report, DeSantis has given “partisan actors unprecedented authority over elections” and created “election police” to investigate and prosecute supposed fraud and intimidate eligible voters.
Voter suppression, subversion, and disenfranchisement, gerrymandering and radical redistricting, are tools long used to subvert the will of the people — particularly African Americans — from their constitutional right to vote.
DeSantis screwed over formerly incarcerated Floridians during his first term. In November 2018, 64.5% of Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to 1.4 million Floridians weighed down by felony convictions but who had completed their sentences.
But that tough victory for social justice activist Desmond Meade and groups including the ACLU and the Brennan Center for Justice was short-lived because DeSantis and Republican lawmakers pulled a bait-and-switch.
The Legislature passed a bill, SB 7066, which DeSantis eagerly signed, demanding that this maligned constituency pay all their court-ordered legal obligations, including restitution, court costs, fines, and fees, in full before being allowed to vote.
The courts ultimately upheld the legislation and, since then, the Legislature largely seen no need to implement a fix, ignoring the will of the 5.1 million Floridians who voted for Amendment 4.
There’s a chance the Legislature will correct this egregious wrong during the new legislative session. South Florida Democrats Felicia Robinson in the House (HB 489) and Tina Polsky in the Senate (SB 848) would require the Florida Commission on Offender Review to develop a central database detailing information regarding any remaining financial obligations.
Meanwhile, the GOP has benefited by lowering the pool of eligible voters and caused a great deal of confusion.
There’s more. DeSantis is pressing the Legislature to make it even harder for citizen initiatives to win ballot access. Passing these measures already requires 60% supermajorities at the polls. Don’t forget that DeSantis forced the Legislature to eliminate a Black-access congressional district in North Florida following the 2020 U.S. Census.
The courts upheld the move, although one judge concluded the governor “acted with race as a motivating factor.”
Free and fair?
Ask DeSantis or just about any Republican why they’re so sensitive about elections and they’ll tell you — with a straight face — that their sincere desire is to ensure elections that are fair and free of fraud.
They’re trying to fool the people.
The Republican Party fears losing political and economic power to increasing numbers of Black and brown voters, with a far-right fringe of the party, including Steve Bannon and billionaire businessman Peter Thiel, voicing the belief that voting should be limited to a small cadre of white, landholding men, with Bannon reportedly saying it would be ‘not such a bad thing’ if millions of African Americans lost the right to vote.
Bill Yeomans, a senior fellow with the Alliance for Justice, said in a 2020 report that race is what’s driving Republicans’ fixation with obstructing voting. “A central tenet of Republican politics for decades … has been to win elections by making it difficult for their opponents to vote — more specifically, by blocking minority access to the ballot,” he said.
Laws implemented in as many as 43 states (including Florida in some respects) disproportionately burden minority voters: requiring photo identification, restricting early voting, limiting registration opportunities, and purging voter rolls. In that way, they have carved out of the electorate the parts that don’t support them.
No accident
The Nation’s justice correspondent, Elie Mystal, argues that Republicans abhor voting rights because they threaten white power, adding that it’s no accident that the voting-rights assault began not with the failed reelection of Donald Trump in 2020 but with the successful election of Barack Obama in 2008.
In a July 2021 article, Mystal suggests comments from Utah Rep. Mike Lee about voting was him “channeling the deepest fears of the slavers and colonists who wrote the Constitution.”
“Those guys understood, as Lee does, that a true democracy, in which everybody gets to vote and participate in self-government, would be a threat to white male hegemony in the New World,” Mystal explained.
“They’re not wrong. The founders and Lee and Jefferson Davis and Ron DeSantis — and all the other white guys who have stood against the right to vote throughout American history — are correct in their assessment that universal suffrage and equal representation are the surest ways to end white male political supremacy.”
‘Three times is a pattern’
In 2022, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee castigated Florida’s decades-long voter suppression effort and struck down several key voting restrictions the Florida Legislature passed the year before, characterizing them as unconstitutional.
He concluded that lawmakers have made voting more difficult for all voters but “intentionally target” minorities and “unduly” burden disabled voters.
“Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern,” Walker wrote. “At some point, when the Florida Legislature passes law after law disproportionately burdening Black voters, this court can no longer accept that the effect is incidental. Based on the indisputable pattern set out above, this court finds that, in the past 20 years, Florida has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters because of their propensity to favor Democratic candidates.”
Specifically, Walker struck down language imposing burdens on organizations that conduct voter-registration drives in Black communities; restrictions on use of ballot drop boxes in locations and during hours most useful to Blacks; and a ban on “line warming,” or provision of food, water, and other assistance to people waiting in line to vote — which lines are more common in Black precincts.
‘Fraud myth’
The Brennan Center released a seminal report, Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth, clarifying that reported incidents are almost always caused by clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report’s meticulous review of voter fraud found incident rates between 0.0003% and 0.0025%, meaning it’s more likely someone would “be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post published a comprehensive 2014 study which found 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast.
Thirty-one cases out of 1 billion.
The Alliance for Justice has described the Voting Rights Acts as “perhaps the biggest check on Republican vote suppression efforts.”
That changed in 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted a portion of the landmark 1965 law. Within days of the ruling, cities and states enacted a wave of voter-discrimination laws intended to restrict the rights of people of color, those with disabilities, students, and others most likely to vote Democratic.
Now that Republicans dominate most of the country’s legislatures as well as the U.S. House, Senate, and the White House, and they’re under the MAGA spell, they’ll be free to continue dismantling the election infrastructure with what Georgia-based Fair Fight Action’s Hillary Holley described in 2021 as “… a strategic imperative that’s well-funded.”
With MAGA fully in charge of the Florida and national governments, America may have lost the way to make this country truly democratic. The truth is that those fighting to make this America a true democracy don’t always battle with the creativity, aggression, and determination this critical moment requires.
Mystal argues that changes around the edges are meaningless.
“The solution to these cyclical outbursts has never been incremental change. Radical legislative interventions (the Voting Rights Act), new constitutional protections (the 15th and 19th amendments), and a judiciary willing to uphold them (Earl Warren protected the voting rights John Roberts is now destroying) have been some of the ways people have fought to limit the antidemocratic instincts of the white men in power,” he writes.
Miriam Machado-Luces
Barrington Salmon lived and wrote in Florida (Miami and Tallahassee) for 20 years. He is a 2017 Annenberg National Fellow (University of Southern California) who currently freelances for publications including the National Newspaper Publishers Association/Black Press USA, Trice Edney Newswire and Al Jazeera.
