Fact Check: Where Nixon and Moody stand on elections and voting rights

Even as Florida’s population has grown by almost 2 million people since the start of this decade, the number of voters in the state has shrunk, according to a recent Miami Herald analysis. The candidates vying to be Florida’s next senator have very different explanations as to why a smaller share of the state’s residents are registered to vote.

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Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon has accused Florida’s Republican leadership of systematic voter suppression since Gov. Ron DeSantis took power in 2018, and led a protest on the House floor earlier this year against partisan gerrymandering.

Meanwhile, as Florida’s attorney general, Republican Senator Ashley Moody fought to remove what she said were ineligible voters on the rolls. As senator, she’s advocated for the passage of the Donald Trump-backed Save America Act, which implements stricter documentation requirements to register to vote.

Issue: Elections and voting

Ashley Moody, Republican nominee

Moody has consistently argued that people who aren’t citizens are voting in elections. She the Department of Homeland Security during Joe Biden’s presidency in 2024 to try to compel the federal government to share immigration data to “ensure that only citizens are on our voter rolls.”

She’s been an outspoken advocate in the Senate for passing the Save America Act, which would require states to cross-check their voter rolls with DHS data and require voters produce extra identification documents.

“This great American experiment hinges on the sanctity and integrity of our elections,” she said on the Senate floor earlier this year.

Moody has also filed a bill in the Senate to require that election officials receive mail ballots by the close of polls and end the practice in some states of counting late-arriving ballots as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

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When the state Legislature redrew Florida’s congressional voting maps in a way that favors Republicans, Moody defended the effort as a necessary response to the state’s population growth.

Angie Nixon, Democratic nominee

In contrast, Nixon led a protest on the Florida House floor this year against those new congressional districts, and held a sit-in outside DeSantis’ office to demand a meeting about the “rigged maps,” as she’s called them.

She’s argued that those maps amounted to a partisan gerrymander and violated Florida’s Constitution. As a state representative, she fought against legislation that added new restrictions on third-party voter registration and vote-by-mail, saying the efforts amounted to voter suppression.

She called a 2021 bill implementing those sweeping changes a “partisan play at suppressing our vote because republicans didn’t like how close we came to the governor’s mansion in 2018” on social media.

Her campaign told the Herald she would fight against the Save America Act and criticized her opponent’s support for it, saying “Sen. Moody’s advocacy for these measures is a partisan effort to intimidate voters and restrict ballot access.”

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This story was originally published October 7, 2026 at 4:41 PM.