"The Most Vicious Attack I've Ever Seen"

FLORIDA

The ability to turn out a large pro-worker vote on Election Day is the only thing that helps even the odds against the hundreds of millions of corporate dollars that pour into political campaigns.

Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott and GOP lawmakers know this. In May, they rammed through a law that severely limits voter registration and early voting.

“It is the most vicious attack I have ever seen on the right and ability of people to participate in the voting process,” says Local 3104’s Gail Marie Perry, an activist who’s helped register voters in Florida for more than 30 years.

The new law makes it almost impossible for unions and other groups to conduct voter registration drives. If the forms that volunteers collect aren’t turned in to the state within 48 hours, “the volunteers will face huge fines of $500 to $1,000 for each form that is late, or contains mistakes, like misspellings or typos,” Perry says.

Even the League of Women Voters, which has registered voters for 91 years, is being forced to end its registration drives in Florida, saying the punitive rules put their volunteers at risk.

Perry says the law will disenfranchise groups of voters who are most likely to back candidates who support workers and the middle class.

“Minorities and students sign up in large numbers during voter registration drives. This new law is about ideology, not protecting the vote.”

The law also shortens from 15 days to eight the early-voting period before elections, when many voters in Florida and other states cast their ballots. “Cutting this period in half hurts the elderly, and Democrats, who tend to outnumber Republicans in early voting,” Perry says.

“We have to get busy and get information about the law out to voters,” Perry says. “If we don’t, the law will have a devastating impact on our ability to elect candidates who care about issues critical to working people.”