{"id":16290,"date":"2012-08-20T16:17:53","date_gmt":"2012-08-20T20:17:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=16290"},"modified":"2012-08-20T16:18:18","modified_gmt":"2012-08-20T20:18:18","slug":"senator-calls-on-governor-to-halt-voter-suppression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=16290","title":{"rendered":"Senator Calls On Governor To Halt Voter Suppres- sion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Leader of Florida Legislative Black Caucus Calls on Governor to Halt Voter Suppression throughout Florida\u2019s non-protected Counties<\/em><\/p>\n<p>TALLAHASSEE \u2013 State Senator <strong>Arthenia Joyner<\/strong> (D-Tampa), Chair, Florida Legislative Black Caucus on Monday called on Republican<strong> Governor Rick Scott<\/strong> to heed the recent federal court ruling preserving early voting in Florida\u2019s 5 protected counties, and halt the voter suppression efforts still underway in the rest of the state by restoring early voting to its previous time period throughout Florida.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Court found that implementation of the 2011 election law would disproportionately affect African American voters in these five counties. If that would occur in five counties, then there is a high likelihood of active voter suppression in Florida\u2019s remaining 62 counties,\u201d <strong>Senator Joyner<\/strong>,\u00a0who currently chairs the Florida Legislative Black Caucus and travelled to Tallahassee to meet with the Governor said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI call on<strong> Governor Scott<\/strong> to stop his party\u2019s blatant attempt to influence an election by denying a fundamental right to Black and white Floridians have fought and died for.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At issue is the governor\u2019s adherence to a 2011 Republican-sponsored change in Florida\u2019s elections law that reduced early voting days by half. The move came 3 years after the 2008 election in which <strong>Barack Obama<\/strong> not only won Florida, but the White House, propelled in part by record voter turnout among Blacks casting early voting ballots. In fact, the lines were so long in some African American communities that<strong> Governor Scott\u2019s<\/strong> predecessor was compelled to issue an Executive Order extending early voting to accommodate the historical demand.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTargeting early voting had only one purpose: to stack the deck in a presidential election by limiting minority turnout and Democratic votes at the polls,\u201d said <strong>Senator Joyner<\/strong>, who has been part of ongoing litigation fighting the election law changes.<\/p>\n<p>The Governor needs to acknowledge the obvious: it would be amoral to address voter suppression in 5 counties and ignore the exact same misconduct in the remaining 62 counties.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Florida Legislative Black Caucus calls on the Governor to immediately act to restore the full early voting time period throughout the entire state and commit to expanding hours even further through Executive Order if the limited hours are unable to suitably accommodate Floridians who seek to early vote.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Leader of Florida Legislative Black Caucus Calls on Governor to Halt Voter Suppression throughout Florida\u2019s non-protected Counties TALLAHASSEE \u2013 State Senator Arthenia Joyner (D-Tampa), Chair, Florida Legislative Black Caucus on Monday called on Republican Governor Rick Scott to heed the recent federal court ruling preserving early voting in Florida\u2019s 5 protected counties, and halt the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}