Ashley Moody offers ‘100% guarantee’ of appeal to election law decision

Attorney General Ashley Moody addressed a U.S. District Court ruling striking parts of a recently passed Florida election law Friday, promising an appeal and lambasting the decision.

“Let me just say in my two decades as a lawyer, and over a decade as a judge, I’ve seen a lot of orders, thousands of orders,” Moody said in Titusville. “That order went very far outside the bounds of what I would expect from a judicial officer, and I 100% guarantee we will appeal.”

Moody’s comments came after U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker, an appointee of President Barack Obama in 2012, issued a beefy 288-page ruling taking aim at “unconstitutional” features of the law.

Walker’s ruling struck down a couple of aspects of the law.

The ruling struck provisions limiting the use of drop boxes to certain hours and requiring they be manned at all times, as well as rules concerning the handling of voting applications delivered by third-party voter registration organizations.

“The court enjoins defendants from enforcing most of SB 90’s challenged provisions,” Walker wrote in his ruling. “In so ruling this Court recognizes that the right to vote and the Voting Rights Act particularly, are under siege.”

Moody’s first comments on the adverse ruling came after Gov. Ron DeSantis offered his own remarks promising an appeal, noting he wasn’t surprised by the ruling considering the source.

“We know going in with certain judges that they’re going to rule on a political basis, a partisan basis, and we anticipated that,” DeSantis said. “But I mean, the stuff that was in there was absurd. It will be appealed. I don’t think there’s any question that it will be stayed and reversed. I just, I don’t know if it will be very quickly or it will take a little bit.”

“This was just way, way outside the bounds of what the current law is and what the current precedent is,” DeSantis added, bemoaning drop boxes that aren’t “safeguarded” as potential dangers.

The Governor said he is “very confident” that the state will prevail in appeal.