Empire State Today

Florida recently enacted laws tightening election security, and has been criticized for restricting voter access to the polls. A comparison, however, of the state’s new voting law with changes that New York made to its election laws in 2019 shows that Florida, in key ways, has increased access to voting that are similar, and even go beyond New York, which has few of the security measures adopted by the Sunshine State.

The new Florida law, for instance, allows for a week of early voting. New York allows eight days. And New York requires voters to change their registration months in advance if they want to participate in a party primary. In Florida, a voter can change registration 29 days before a primary and at any time to vote in a general election race.

Florida’s new law increasing voter security, moreover, deserves none of the “voter suppression” outrage it received when Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the bill into the law in May, according to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.

“Florida’s new law says voters requesting a mail ballot must provide a state ID number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. This is hardly some insurmountable barrier,” the Journal wrote, adding that “in-person polling places accept a variety of identification, including passports, as well as photo IDs from schools, retirement centers, government employers and public-assistance programs.”

Florida’s new law also was criticized for banning ballot harvesting (third-party pickup of mail-in ballots).

“Critics say there’s no evidence of shady vote harvesting last year. Yet Florida has a sordid history with boleteros, or ballot brokers," the Journal wrote. "After Miami’s 1997 mayoral election, dozens of people faced charges. The purported winner was evicted from office four months later, when courts overturned the result.”

In many instances, the existing voting laws in blue states are more restrictive than states that recently moved to tighten their laws, as recently was pointed out by Russell Berman of The Atlantic.

“[President] Biden has assailed Georgia’s new voting law as an atrocity akin to 'Jim Crow in the 21st Century' for the impact it could have on black citizens,” Berman wrote. “But even once the GOP-passed measure takes effect, Georgia citizens will still have far more opportunities to vote before Election Day than their counterparts in the president’s home state [Delaware], where one in three residents is black or Latino.”

Finally, a recent survey of other countries by the Crime Prevention Research Center found that “election integrity measures are widely accepted globally,” according to John Lott, founder of the center.

“Of 47 nations surveyed in Europe—a place where, on other matters, American progressives often look to with envy—all but one country requires a government-issued photo voter ID to vote,” Lott wrote. “The exception is the United Kingdom, and even there voter IDs are mandatory in Northern Ireland for all elections and in parts of England for local elections. Moreover, [Prime Minister] Boris Johnson’s government recently introduced legislation  to have the rest of the country follow suit.”