Florida voter registrations down sharply since DeSantis-led crackdown on fraud claims

Florida Republicans have imposed thousands of dollars in fines on voter registration groups in the state.

Fines totaling more than $100,000 were levied by the state’s newly established office of election crimes and security against at least 26 groups -- including for-profit and nonprofit organizations and both the statewide Democratic and Republican parties -- as part of Gov. Ron DeSantis' crackdown on alleged voter fraud, reported The Guardian.

“The message is clear, [third-party voter registration organizations] are an endangered species in Florida, and it affects this population disparately,” said Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida.

Voter registrations have dropped sharply since 2019, with just 2,430 new registrations through third-party voter registration organizations this year, compared to 63,212 new voter registrations third-party groups submitted through the end of 2019.

“When you start to ratchet down the ability for groups and their First Amendment rights to petition ... government by getting people registered to vote, you are going to affect that overall population of registered voters," Smith said.

IN OTHER NEWS: Jack Smith can prove 'Trump participated in an insurrection': Former Bush official

The fines range from $50 to tens of thousands of dollars, and nearly all the infractions reviewed by The Guardian in a public records request covering the non-profit Hispanic Federation involved voters incorrectly identifying their county residence, and most of those were addresses bordering a neighboring county.

“Despite our good faith efforts, professionalism, and due diligence, we cannot eliminate some applications from being processed with errors as we have not been given access to an official mechanism to verify the information of each applicant – which is, in any case, not our role,” the group wrote in a letter to the state. “There is no claim that we intentionally misrepresented, nor is there a claim that we diverted, such registrations from the correct county or that we held on to the registrations beyond the required period in which they were to be delivered.”

Although the state GOP has been flagged for infractions, two left-leaning groups -- the for-profit Hard Knocks Strategies LLC and Poder Latinx -- have accounted for more than $70,000 in fines for turning in forms late or to the wrong county.

“We’re a small voter registration organization with a long history of playing by all the rules. We had to pay the penalties in Florida to avoid even costlier litigation, but paid them without admission of wrongdoing,” Hard Knocks Strategies said in a statement. “Are voter registration organizations on the right being targeted as aggressively and frequently in Florida as those seeking to register voters of color and other underrepresented communities? Given Governor DeSantis’ track record, that question may be rhetorical.”