WASHINGTON, DC – RITE PAC, alongside the Florida Secretary of State and the RNC, have secured a major victory in the Northern District of Florida, where the court on October 30 dismissed a complaint lodged by activists represented by Elias Law Group. The complaint falsely alleged Florida’s voter registration process violates the Civil Rights Act. May Mailman of RITE PAC describes the win as a “significant setback for the left’s efforts to undermine election integrity prior to the upcoming presidential elections.”
“The court got it right in ruling that Elias’s dark money groups have no plausible claim here. The Civil Rights Act does many things, but it obviously does not ban the simple act of signing your voter registration, which is what the activists are alleging as part of a nationwide effort to degrade the integrity of our elections. RITE PAC will continue to defend democratically enacted election laws because American citizens deserve elections run by law, not well-financed plaintiffs.”
– May Mailman, vice president of RITE PAC
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida ruled that Florida’s law requiring an original signature on a voter registration document does not trigger the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits election administrators for disqualifying voters based on immaterial registration errors not grounded in a state’s legal qualifications to vote. “Physically signing a voter registration form and thereby attesting, under penalty of perjury, that one satisfies the requirements to vote carries a solemn weight,” the court said. Requiring applicants to engage in that serious process does not violate the Civil Rights Act.
The case was hatched by activists represented by Marc Elias’s firm who argued that Florida’s registration process, which allows applicants to use either an electronic signature stored with the DMV or provide an original signature, violated the “Materiality Provision” of the Civil Rights Act. That provision was designed to prevent racist registrars from excluding would-be Black voters from registering based on immaterial errors. Election officials cannot, for example, ask Black voters to give their precise months of age and disqualify those who provide wrong answers. State law, after all, does not require voters be a specific number of months old. It requires 18 years of age.
Mailman added,
“We constantly see activist groups trying to undermine state election laws to inject chaos into the American elections and doing so under the guise of democracy. But their goal is generating headlines, emotion, and donations, not improving our democratic process. RITE stands for something bigger: election results should reflect the will of the people rather than the energy of well-funded partisan activists.”
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