Earlier this week, we blogged about Jill Cicciarelli, a high school teacher in Florida who faced serious fines for helping 50 of her students to register to vote. The reason? An onerous web of bureaucratic rules that the state recently adopted.
The St. Petersburg Times has this to say about the new law’s impact on voter registration efforts:
“Republican lawmakers and the Scott administration disingenuously defend the new law as an effort to thwart voter fraud. But the real fraud here is the Legislature’s effort to suppress voting by creating an unmanageable maze of bureaucracy, making it almost impossible for third party groups to sign up voters and reducing the window for Floridians to cast a ballot. There is no evidence of systemic voter fraud in Florida.
Many county elections supervisors, along with U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, have called on Scott and the Legislature to repeal or revamp this regressive, egregiously partisan election law. For the sake of Jill Cicciarelli and her students, a young person’s first experience in citizenship should not consist of being denied an opportunity to register to vote and seeing the teacher charged with a crime for promoting democracy.”
Read more about HB 1355 here.