The Florida Democratic Party (FDP) is urging members to confirm they are still election-ready after a U.S. House candidate revealed he was recently deactivated from the state's voter rolls.
Former Key Biscayne Mayor Mike Davey, a Democrat running for Florida's 27th Congressional District in Miami-Dade, shared this past weekend that the state had removed him in October from its list of active voters.
The removal came, he said, despite his long tenancy in an apartment building where his father, a Republican, also has a unit but did not see any registration change.
"In January, I saw a story … about people being purged from the rolls. … We've seen what Republicans have done in Tallahassee to make it more difficult to register, to make it more difficult to vote, (and) I'd heard something about … more Democrats being removed than Republicans, so I thought, 'Let me just look into this,'" he told Jim DeFede of CBS News Miami.
"I've been voting since I moved to Florida 21 years ago. I've been registered in the same precinct. So, I went and checked and, sure enough, I had been deactivated as a Democrat. And my father, as a Republican, had not been. He's only been there three years — same address, different apartment."
Davey was able to reactivate his voter status and said doing so "was easy." The Miami-Dade Elections Department blamed the issue on a mistake with his address.
But what happened to him is happening more often, following the passage of election laws in 2022 and 2023 designed to stifle voter registration and voter fraud. Critics of the measures, including many Democratic state lawmakers, decried the changes as veiled attempts to suppress progressive votes, particularly from African Americans.
In December, Florida Bulldog reported that nearly 1 million registered voters had been dropped from Florida's active voter rolls since last year. Democrats and no-party voters accounted for 90% of them.
Under the 2023 law (SB 7050), which tightened existing strictures on active voters and third-party voter-registration groups, every county Supervisor of Elections (SOE) must perform a "list maintenance" yearly by April 1. Voters who did not participate in the last two General Elections or whose legal residence status is under question can be switched to inactive if they don't respond to SOE communications.
Broward SOE Joe Scott, a Democrat, told Florida Bulldog he expected a mass revocation of voter registrations this year, but pushed back on the notion that it is part of a GOP conspiracy. He still opposed the change, favoring a universal registration system like "motor voter" in which every U.S. citizen of voting age is automatically registered when they interact with a government agency or receive a state-issued license.
"What I think overall that the bill did was make it harder for people to get registered and a lot easier to get removed," he said, adding that "by design" Florida's registration and voter-purging system disproportionately affects minorities.
FDP Chair Nikki Fried said Florida GOP policymakers are putting their thumbs on the scale of democracy and the best way Democrats can combat it in the short term is to ensure they're cleared to vote now. "Republicans have been caught in the act," she said in a statement.
"For years, Republicans have been wiping Democrats from the voter rolls to inflate their voter registration advantage. Following intentional changes in election laws with the passage of SB 524 in 2022 and SB 7050 in 2023, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of inactive voters in the state, and Democrats are marked as inactive at substantially higher rates."
As of April 9, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by nearly 892,000 voters, up from a 500,000-voter lead last July. It's the largest advantage the party has ever enjoyed.
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