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Hundreds of voting rights advocates, civil rights organizations and legislators rallied Wednesday at the Florida Capitol Building in Tallahassee to demand the Legislature pass the Harry T. and Harriet V. Moore Florida Voting Rights Act. The event was live streamed on Ocoee Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis' Facebook page.
“ This Voting Rights Act is about the 23 million Floridians regardless of their background, regardless of who they love, regardless of who their parents are, regardless of their party affiliation," Dwight Bullard, senior policy adviser with the civil rights organization Florida Rising told the crowd. "This bill is for everyone. Republican, Democrat, independent, black, white, and everything in between.”
This is the second year voting rights advocates gathered at the Capitol Building to support this legislation, which is named for two Black teachers and civil rights activists who registered more than 100,000 Black voters in Florida before their assassination by the Ku Klux Klan in 1951.
The legislation did not receive a committee hearing last year and is not on the agenda for a hearing yet this session. It is currently in the Government Operations Subcommittee.
Speaking to the crowd Wednesday, Bracy Davis, the Democrat leading the House effort to pass the Act with House Bill 1409, described it as “a piece of good, common-sense legislation that does what democracy demands: protect the rights of every voter in our state.”
Sen. Tracie Davis, a Jacksonville Democrat, is sponsoring the companion legislation Senate Bill 1582. She picked up the bill after the death last month of the original Senate sponsor, Sen. Geraldine F. Thompson. The full Democratic Caucus of both chambers signed on as co-sponsors.
Rally speakers, like Abdelilah Skhir, senior strategist at of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida (ACLU), spoke of being moved to commemorate the Moores, considered the first civil rights casualties, when they heard Thompson share their story at an event.
“We left that event so inspired by her words and her wisdom that we wanted to memorialize them,” Skhir said. “ So we set a goal of creating the most ambitious pro-voter bill ever filed in Florida.”
The Florida Voting Rights Act aims to roll back the voting restrictions passed by Republicans after the 2020 election. The bill includes the following provisions:
“ The Florida Voting Rights Act builds on the Federal Voting Rights Act,” Martin Harris of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund told the crowd. “If enacted, the Florida Voting Rights Act would become the most comprehensive state voting rights act in the nation. Our country is stronger when everyone has an equal opportunity to vote.”
Jonathan Webber, Florida policy director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, reminded rally-goers that the Federal Voting Rights Act had offered substantial protections for voters in states like Florida, which had histories of voter disenfranchisement stretching back to Reconstruction, that required them to get federal approval before making any changes to voting laws.
“But in 2013, the Shelby v. Holder decision gutted those protections,” he said, “and since then we've seen restriction after restriction, targeting registration, ballot access, even punishing people simply or trying to vote. This is not what democracy looks like.”
Indeed, Harris told a chilling story of being a poll watcher in Pinellas County during the 2024 election and seeing an 18-year-old brandish a machete to intimidate voters at the Beaches Ranch Library. He said the Florida Voting Rights Act would provide “critical protections” against voter suppression tactics, including “prohibiting voter intimidation so that weapons like a machete cannot be used to threaten voters at a polling place."
A running theme of the rally was the game Tag, which Bracy Davis said she’d been thinking about when prepping her remarks, as a metaphor of passing the responsibilities to fight for civil rights from generation to generation as well as spreading the word about the Harry T. and Harriet V. Moore Florida Voting Rights Act from person to person — and to Tallahassee legislators.
“Stop waiting for the next hero to arrive,” Bracy Davis entreated the crowd. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. The Moores passed us the fight. Sen. Thompson passed us the torch, and now it's up to us to pass this bill.”
