On May 14, 2025, Midpoint welcomed Teresa Potter, President of the League of Women Voters of Hillsborough and Pasco Counties, and Nick Biscardi, a lead volunteer with People Power Florida, an organization founded by a Friend of Midpoint, Democratic State Rep. Anna Eskamani of Orlando. The League is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that promotes the right to vote and fights voter suppression. People Power Florida is working to make registering to vote more accessible for all Floridian citizens, particularly for young people.
Our guests discussed the impact of the 2023 restrictions placed on third-party voter registration organizations, like the League and People Power, which made it harder and more dangerous to register voters, and how those restrictions have become even more onerous in 2025. The restrictions include mandating that third-party voter registration organizations ensure that individuals collecting registration applications are citizens, shortening the number of applications that can be submitted at a time, and limiting the time frame in which they may be submitted. The legislature also imposed higher fines and penalties for violations of these provisions. This has made it more difficult to recruit volunteers to register voters and made the registration process itself more onerous leading the League to forego using paper registration forms completely and turning to assisting voters to register themselves electronically on tablets that members bring to public events.
The 2025 legislature made significant changes to the citizen initiative process, a Florida constitutional mechanism by which citizens can gather signatures on a petition to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot for the voters’ approval. All of these changes are designed to make the process more difficult and the burdens on the initiative’s proponents more onerous. Now, individuals collecting more than 25 signatures must register with the state, and failure to do so can result in felony charges. Non-citizens, non-Florida residents, and individuals with unrestored felony convictions are prohibited from signature gathering. Petitions must include sensitive personal data, such as the circulator’s name and address. These measures are designed to suppress grassroots campaigning and limit direct democracy and seem to be motivated by the recent near successes of the 2024 amendments to protect abortion rights and legalize recreational marijuana. Both these initiatives were aggressively opposed by the DeSantis administration and the Republican-controlled legislature which now passed this law.
The one “golden nugget” in this legislation was a ban on the use of public funds for political advertisements related to constitutional amendments as occurred in the 2024 election.
Another area where the legislature made it harder to vote was new modifications to the Vote By Mail (VBM) procedures. Voters must now request a VBM ballot each calendar year, rather than every two years. Secure ballot drop boxes are only available during early voting hours and must be monitored by election personnel. Failure to comply with the drop box regulations may result in a $25,000 fine for election options.
Voting laws have always been reserved for the states and they may vary from state to state, but recently the federal government and the President have sought to impose nationwide voting requirements that would severely restrict the right to vote, particularly for the estimated 69 million American women who changed their name after marriage. All citizens would be disadvantaged by the proposed requirement in the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) which among other things requires all voters to provide expensive proof of American citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, whenever registering to vote or even updating their registration by changing their address or party. This bill is up for review in the Senate where it is not expected to pass, but recently President Trump signed an Executive Order that incorporates the SAVE Act by Presidential fiat. This attempt at enacting a nationwide restrictive voting law is so unprecedented, unconstitutional, and ill-advised that the League of Women Voters of the United States has filed its first-ever legal challenge, joined with LULAC, the largest and oldest Hispanic organization in the United States, in the federal courts.
You can listen to the entire show from our archives here, in the WMNF app, or as a WMNF Midpoint podcast from Apple Music or Spotify.
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