In a court of law, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose — and sometimes you get beaten to a pulp.
Rick Scott just got pulped.
In a recent decision, a federal judge ruled that the governor’s elections division was way out of line when it tried to ban early voting on every college campus in Florida.
You probably didn’t need a judge to tell you this. The state’s position was absurd.
Basically, Scott’s elections division had tried to tell counties that they could set up early voting sites in the 10 days before an election at just about every public venue imaginable — senior centers, convention centers, libraries, sports stadiums, fairgrounds, county commission buildings … everywhere except college campuses.
Take that, young people.
U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker said the state’s scheme revealed “a stark pattern of discrimination” meant to create “a secondary class of voters.”
“Throwing up roadblocks in front of younger voters does not remotely serve the public interest,” Walker continued. “Abridging voter rights never does.”
Hizzoner was quite clear and quite right.
And before any hyper-partisans start whining about “judicial activism” — the go-to gripe for sore losers — know that Walker has sided with Scott in the past, including in a battle against the state’s teachers union.
Walker was also put on the bench by a 96-0 vote in the U.S. Senate.
Really, though, I don’t believe many thinking people from either party would challenge the judge’s decision … because it was just so obvious.
“This was truly a victory for the citizens of this state,” said Patti Brigham, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida. “It’s a victory for Democracy.”
The League helped a group of college students who had challenged the election division’s anti-college-campus rules.
While considering their arguments, Walker suggested that, if anything, the state had more of an obligation to make voting convenient for college students, since a disproportionate number of them don’t have cars.
So why try to redline campuses?
Because Scott and fellow Republicans are scared of the youth movement — 18-to-25-year-olds who tend to vote blue. These politicians prefer their voters old and red.
So they set up a system where Orange County, for example, would offer early voting at the “Senior Recreation Center” on Marks Street in downtown Orlando, which serves a few hundred citizens a week, but not at the University of Central Florida, which has more than 60,000 students.
The whole scenario is pretty rich. Politicians often patronizingly tell youngsters: “If you don’t like the way things are done, you should try to get involved.” But then when the youngsters do just that, the politicians start wetting themselves in fear. So they start trying to stack the deck.
They did the same thing with black voters a few years back when the Legislature tried to eliminate early voting on the Sunday before Election Day — the day many black churches headed to the polls directly after Sunday services as part of their “souls to polls” efforts.
Once upon a time, both parties encouraged easily accessible early voting for all. Gov. Jeb Bush was a prime proponent.
But after he left office, a new generation of GOP legislators started studying ways to game the system. They noticed older residents (who vote redder) liked to use mail-in ballots so they didn’t have to leave their homes. So they let that run for weeks — while trying to curb the in-person methods more often used by blacks and youth. (There was also an effort to shorten voting days in general.)
I actually think predictions of a mass “blue wave” of young voters coming out this year have been overstated. But it appears Scott and Co. didn’t want to take any chances. So they deemed college campuses unholy ground. And to justify their decision, they cited potential problems with parking.
Walker found those concerns “neither precise nor sufficiently weighty,” saying that local officials were in a better position to judge parking than bureaucrats or politicians in Tallahassee. He declared the scheme unconstitutional.
Still, the scheming may prove effective.
Since Walker issued his ruling just two weeks ago, local elections supervisors are scrambling.
Orange elections supervisor Bill Cowles said it’s too late for him to add an early-voting site at UCF for the primaries, since early voting starts next Friday — Aug. 17, running through Sunday, Aug. 26.
But Cowles said he’s talking with UCF to see about setting up a site before the general election in November.
Let’s hope he does. Otherwise, all this Tallahassee scheming — this attempt at “discrimination” and “abridging voter rights,” as Judge Walker called it — will have paid off.
smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com
