TO: Interested Parties
FROM: Phillip Jerez, Executive Director
DATE: Tuesday, August 13, 2024
RE: The Truth About the Voter Registration Gap

Florida Republicans are quick to take victory laps on their manufactured voter registration lead — but what Republicans aren’t telling you is that this voter registration total excludes 886,066 registered Democratic voters.

These misleading results first reported by WUFT Fresh Take Florida are a product of Republican voter suppression tactics. Over the past few years, Republicans have passed new elections laws, two specifically that changed ‘list maintenance’ processes. As a result, almost one million Democratic voters have been labeled “inactive voters” and wiped from the total reported to the public — the same margin Republicans claim victory on. While inactive voters are not counted in official voter registration totals, they are still eligible to vote on Election Day.

This empty rhetoric is not new — the Florida GOP’s focus on the voter registration gap is a smokescreen to cover for their blatant voter suppression tactics.

Following the 2022 elections, which saw historically low turnout for Florida Democrats — intentional changes in election laws targeting voters who sat out 2022 caused a dramatic rise in the number of inactive voters in the state. As a result, Democrats are now disproportionately affected by these new laws (S.B. 524 and S.B. 7050) and marked as inactive at substantially higher rates — enabling Republicans to benefit from these voter suppression tactics and inflate their perceived voter registration lead.

Republicans have used every dirty trick in the book to suppress votes in Florida.

To prop up their unpopular policies, DeSantis and his cronies have targeted the tools and methods most critical to engaging voters:

– Republicans created enhanced criminal penalties and fines for those who assist Floridians in registering to vote — resulting in many organizations across Florida ending their voter registration operations.
– Republicans canceled millions of vote-by-mail requests and created extra restrictions on drop boxes — knowing that Black voters utilize dropboxes at a higher rate.
– After Florida voters restored voting rights to returning citizens who completed their sentences, Republicans created a modern-day poll tax to keep them from voting.
– Republicans created an elections police force and used it to target people who were mistakenly registered to vote but still owed their poll tax
– Republicans changed the way elections officials maintain the voting rolls, throwing millions of voters into inactive status and threatening to cancel their voter registration — tactics that disproportionately affected Democrats.

Deeper analysis of inactive voter trends show that Black voters are the hardest hit by this intentional effort to make voters invisible, promoting further disengagement within minority communities that are already disenfranchised by gerrymandering and racially motivated voter suppression laws.

While inactive voters are not counted in public voter registration totals, they are still eligible to vote on Election Day.

And in 2024, we are already seeing a massive momentum shift. Since Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race, the Florida Democratic Party has seen a major boost in enthusiasm in Florida, recording the highest increase of new volunteers in the country with more than 20,000 Floridians signed up to fight back against Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and the extreme Republican Party.

The Florida Democratic Party has never been more organized to face the uphill battle ahead of us to close the gap and take back our state — that’s what Florida Democrats are going to be focused on from now until Election Day.

Read the full memo with a breakdown of 2023 data HERE.