Lawmaker says businesses should ‘stay in their lane’

TALLAHASSEE — The sponsor of a Florida bill imposing new restrictions on how mail-in votes can be handled among other changes to election laws says he isn’t backing down in the face of Major League Baseball’s pulling the All-Star Game out of Atlanta because of a new Georgia law restricting voting access.

“Those businesses need to stay in their lane. They really should not be involved in this,” said Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, on Thursday. “We have much, much, much more access to polls than other states. So I dare any corporation to come in here and say that we’re restricting peoples’ access to the polls.”

Ingoglia, though, rewrote his bill, HB 7041, to weaken a prohibition on passing out water or food to voters waiting in line to vote within 150 feet of the polling place, one of the provisions in the bill similar to the Georgia law.

The change, approved by the House Appropriations Committee on Thursday, still allows water or food to be distributed within 150 feet as long as it’s not done with the intent to influence a voter. The previous version outlawed “giving or attempting to give any item” to a voter.

“I don’t think we backed away from anything in the last bill … the intent is that you’re really not supposed to be campaigning in line, so if you’re there campaigning and it’s clear campaigning, then that would be against the law,” Ingoglia, the former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, told reporters. “I don’t care what people are saying in Georgia. What I care about is Florida and our election laws.”

The Florida measure is one of a wave of bills across the country aimed at restricting voting laws, particularly mail voting, spurred by former President Donald Trump’s claims that voter fraud cost him reelection last year.

In addition to the removal of the All-Star Game by MLB, other corporations, such as CocaCola, Delta and Home Depot have criticized the Georgia law, spurring a backlash from conservative lawmakers.Democrats, who see the law in Georgia and proposals in other states as a nationwide effort to target their voters, are encouraging more businesses to speak out.

“In response to the numerous voter suppression bills being pushed by legislatures across the country, it is imperative that corporations utilize their influence in opposing these proposals that attack our democracy and threaten to disenfranchise minority voters by adding more difficult and unnecessary barriers to voting,” Rep. Fentrice Driskell, D-Tampa, said in a statement released Tuesday.

“We need their alliance in protecting our democratic process. I urge corporations in Florida, and other states, to take a stand and support the people who allow their businesses to thrive.”

Trump has said Georgia’s law doesn’t do enough to prevent voter fraud, but Florida’s bill contains relatively few restrictions and doesn’t go nearly as far as Georgia’s law in putting hurdles in front of voters.

The latest version of HB 7041 would prohibit anyone other than an immediate family member — a parent, child, grandchild, grandparent, sibling or spouse — of a voter from handling that person’s mail ballot. The provision is intended to prevent ballot “harvesting” where someone can gather multiple mail votes and submit them to elections offices, a practice that has led to charges of fraud in local Florida elections in the past.

The bill also requires anyone seeking to vote by mail to give their drivers’ license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.

The Georgia law also requires a state ID but goes further, banning election officials from sending out applications for mail ballots to all voters, and voters have less time to request them, with the window for mail ballot requests opening 78 days before an election instead of 180 days.

Drop boxes still exist under Georgia law but will be restricted to one per every 100,000 active registered voters. That means the 94 drop boxes in the Atlanta metro area would be reduced to 23 under the law, according to a New York Times analysis.

In Florida’s HB 7041, drop boxes will still be allowed, but after a location is selected by a supervisor of elections it can’t be moved. Also, every drop box must be monitored by election officials 24 hours a day, who must check IDs to ensure they’re placing their own ballot or that of their immediate family members in the box.

However, the Senate version of the bill, SB 90, would eliminate drop boxes altogether. Ingoglia acknowledged he’ll have to negotiate with the Senate on the final version of the bill but said he favors keeping drop boxes.

The Georgia law restricts early voting by requiring polling places to be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. but allows election officials to expand that to 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Not every official will expand the hours, though, and some voting rights groups believe people who can’t get off work won’t be able to get to the polls in counties that don’t expand the hours.

Neither the House nor Senate versions of the elections bill in Florida restrict early voting.

The Georgia law removes the Secretary of State from the State Elections Board and gives the GOP-led Legislature in that state the power to suspend local election officials. Florida’s bills do not contain those provisions.

Critics have argued if that had been the law in 2020, the Legislature could have overturned Joe Biden’s narrow victory over Trump in Georgia.

Supervisors of elections would be required to keep a running total posted on their websites of the number of mail ballots they’ve received and the number that remain uncounted, starting the day before the election, under HB 7041.

Another change made to HB 7041 requires election officials to use a “wet signature” made within the last four years when verifying a voter’s signature on the rolls. A “wet signature” is one made with an ink pen or pencil, as opposed to a digital signature made with a finger or digital pen.

The change addressed concerns from Democrats that some voters’ signatures made with a digital pen or with their finger on an iPad wouldn’t match because they vary so much from an ink pen signature. Ingoglia said he doesn’t care that his bill doesn’t go as far as what Trump wants, and he’s only pushing the bill to place more safeguards on Florida’s elections.

He and Democrats have praised how the election was handled in 2020, which ran smoothly compared with 2018, when there were three statewide recounts and allegations of fraud made by U.S. Sen. Rick Scott. State law enforcement investigated and found no fraud that election year.

“We’re doing what we feel is best for the state of Florida to make sure that we keep elections safe and secure,” Ingoglia said.

The bill has one more committee hearing in the House before heading to the floor. The Senate version has one more hearing in that chamber too before getting a floor vote.