As I wrote about earlier today, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued any order precleared one section of HB1355 (regarding voters who had moved within the State) but not precleared the change to early voting days (though it did telegraph to the State how it could be precleared).

The Court also included the following analysis of some of the State’s arguments:

• Florida’s proposed interpretation of the effect test would thus mean that section 5 could not prevent the adoption of modern-day equivalents of Jim Crow-era voting laws. To state that proposition is to refute it.
  
• Voting is a fundamental right, “preservative of other basic civil and political rights,” Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 562 (1964), and no amount of voter disenfranchisement can be regarded as “de minimis.”
  
• Further, as we explain in more detail in the course of our discussion of specific voting changes, see infra Part II.B.1, we disagree with Florida’s position that a change is not retrogressive if it affects “in the aggregate significantly more [w]hites than minorities.” Fla. Br. 53 (emphasis added). Focusing on the effects of voting changes in absolute terms would mean that almost no ballot access change would be considered retrogressive; after all, the fact that fewer members of a particular group are present in the overall electorate is part of what it means to be a minority group. Applying the effect test in the manner Florida suggests would thus allow covered jurisdictions to enact changes with clearly adverse effects on minority voters so long as more white voters were also affected. That approach would fly in the face of the Voting Rights Act’s primary goal of protecting minority voting populations. The retrogression assessment must therefore be conducted in relative terms, with reference to the proportions of each group affected by the change.
  
• Although we have concluded that we cannot preclear Florida’s early votingchanges at this time because those changes authorize the covered counties to offer a statutory minimum number of hours that may result in retrogression, it is possible that the counties will instead, as Florida predicts, opt to provide substantially more hours than that minimum. As we discuss below, under at least one such scenario we are persuaded that Florida would likely satisfy its burden of showing a nonretrogressive effect: that is, if the covered counties were to provide the maximum authorized 96 hours on a standard 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. schedule. When a court finds that it cannot preclear one iteration of a submitted plan, but may be able to preclear a modified version, the Supreme Court has expressed
  approval for issuing a kind of “conditional order” indicating the circumstances under which approval may be obtained. See, e.g., City of Port Arthur, 459 U.S. at 167-68 (expressing approval of the district court’s “conditional order” denying preclearance of the expansion of a city’s borders unless the city agreed to eliminate a majority-vote requirement for certain elections); City of Richmond, 422 U.S. at 370 (stating that the district court in City of Petersburg, 354 F. Supp. 1021, “was correct in conditioning approval of the annexation upon the adoption of the plan to elect councilmen by wards”).  We do so here.
  

• In sum, the record evidence persuades us that, if the covered counties offer the maximum available early voting hours each day on a standard 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. schedule, the negative effect of reducing the number of days from 12 to 8 would likely be offset by the ameliorative effects of adding non-working weekday hours, a Sunday, and additional weekend hours.