Congresswoman Corrine Brown has obtained a hearing date from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida for her motion for preliminary injunction to start early voting 15 days before Election Day and permit early voting through the Sunday before Election Day. Judge Timothy Corrigan will hear the motion on September 19 at 9:30 a.m.
If granted, the injunction would allow Floridians the opportunity to cast ballots according to the schedules in effect from 2004 until this year. Early voting was instituted after the debacle of the 2000 elections when thousands were turned away from overcrowded polls. A 2011 law reduced early voting to ten days, gave county supervisors arbitrary discretion over the number of hours polls are open, and eliminated voting on the last Sunday.
“There is absolutely no explanation for restricting early voting other than intentional voter suppression. Governor Scott does not want people to vote,” said Brown. Indeed, former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, Jim Greer, recently revealed that party leaders discussed reducing early voting as a means to reduce minority turnout. “We should be making it easier for people to get the polls, not harder, but that’s not what they want,” Brown declared.
Congresswoman Brown, along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference-Jacksonville chapter, several individual Duval residents, and the Duval County Democratic Executive Committee, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit claiming that changes to the early voting laws are unconstitutional and discriminatory. Specifically plaintiffs allege that the changes violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States constitution, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 42 U.S.C. and 1973 (a) and the Florida constitution.
"Early voting has worked extremely well for all Floridians, and especially for African American voters," Brown explained. "In fact, African Americans rely on early voting more than any other group. More than half of all African American voters vote early, but I filed this lawsuit so that everyone will have this opportunity."