Republicans Made It Dangerous To Register A Voter. These Kids Do It Anyway.

Florida Republicans raised the fine for registering voters to $250,000. Registration drives collapsed by 95 percent. The Florida Youth Justice Coalition is out there doing it anyway.

Defiant Donkey Sep 27

Cecile Scoon runs the League of Women Voters in Florida. Her organization has registered tens of thousands of voters. She had to stop collecting paper registration forms, because one fine under the new law would be larger than her entire annual budget.

The fine is $250,000.

They Priced Democracy Out Of Reach

In 2022, Republicans raised the maximum yearly fine for a voter registration group from $1,000 to $50,000. The next year they raised it again, to $250,000.

You can trigger it by handing in a form eleven days after someone signs it instead of ten. Or by turning a form in to the wrong county office.

They also require the volunteer who registered you to print their own full name on a receipt and hand it to a stranger. Older women who had volunteered for years quit over that one. They did not feel safe.

In the months after the law took effect, voter registrations through drives dropped by 95 percent.

They got what they paid for. That state already ranks 47th in the country for the share of eligible citizens who are registered, and people of color there are five times more likely to get registered by a group like this than white people are.

Somebody Still Has To Knock On The Door

The Florida Youth Justice Coalition is made up of young organizers doing the work the big groups had to walk away from: running canvasses, knocking doors, registering people, putting bodies where the political class assumed nobody would show up.

No corporation funds them and no billionaire is behind them. Money comes in, and it goes out to organizers on the ground, canvasses in neighborhoods, and actions the people in Tallahassee were counting on nobody being able to afford.

Donate Here! Register Voters Today!

The Cheapest Thing On The Board

A congressional race costs millions. A field organizer costs a fraction of that, and a registered voter stays registered for every election after this one.

The men who wrote that law bet that nobody would risk a quarter of a million dollars to sign up a 19-year-old in a parking lot. These kids took the bet.

Click Here: Back The Florida Youth Justice Coalition

Make Them Wrong About The Money

Their whole plan assumes the people who register voters are too broke to keep doing it.

Twenty-five dollars is a stack of doors knocked in a state they have written off.

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