MIAMI — Republicans in the Florida Legislature handed an election overhaul invoice on Thursday that’s set to usher in a bunch of voting restrictions in one of the crucial essential battleground states in the nation, adding to the national push by G.O.P. state lawmakers to cut back voting entry.

The invoice makes Florida the primary main swing state received by former President Donald J. Trump to move vital voting limits and displays Republicans’ dedication to reshape electoral methods even in states the place they’ve been ascendant. Mr. Trump carried the state last year by more than three percentage points, different Republicans additionally carried out strongly, and the occasion raised new hopes of its means to enchantment to Latino voters.

But Republicans in Florida argued that its elections wanted to be safer, although voting unfolded easily in 2020 and arguments by Democrats and voting rights consultants that a number of the new measures would disproportionately have an effect on voters of coloration. Now the state is on the verge of weakening key elements of an intensive voting infrastructure that was slowly constructed after the state’s chaotic 2000 election and was quickly enlarged final yr due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The new invoice would restrict using drop containers; add extra identification necessities for these requesting absentee ballots; require voters to request an absentee poll for every election, quite than obtain them routinely via an absentee voting record; restrict who may gather and drop off ballots; and additional empower partisan observers through the ballot-counting course of. The laws would additionally broaden a present rule that prohibits exterior teams from offering gadgets “with the intent to influence” voters inside a 150-foot radius of a polling location.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has indicated his help for the voting overhaul and is anticipated to signal it. The invoice handed largely alongside a party-line vote in each chambers, 77 to 40 in the House and 23 to 17 in the Senate, although one Republican state senator, Jeff Brandes of St. Petersburg, voted towards it.

The laws follows an identical legislation passed recently by Georgia, and comes as Texas, Arizona and different states led by Republicans pursue limits on entry to the poll. G.O.P. lawmakers have been fueled by a celebration base that has largely embraced Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen 2020 election. In Florida, Republican legislators promoted the voting invoice whereas offering little proof of any issues with fraud, and regardless of their continued claims that the state’s 2020 election was the “gold standard” for the nation.

“There was no problem in Florida,” stated Kara Gross, the legislative director and senior coverage counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Everything worked as it should. The only reason they’re doing this is to make it harder to vote.”

Once the invoice is signed into legislation, Florida will develop into the primary state to create new limitations to voting after companies throughout the nation embarked on a public pressure campaign to oppose such measures. Major firms, after talking out towards voting payments in states like Georgia and Texas, remained largely muted on the Republican push in Florida.

Hovering over Florida’s debate in regards to the invoice was the state’s sturdy and exceptionally fashionable custom of voting by mail — and a current sea change in which occasion benefited most from it.

In the 2016 and 2018 elections, roughly a 3rd of the state’s voters forged ballots via the mail. And in each years, extra Republicans than Democrats voted by mail.

But in 2020, greater than 2.1 million Democrats forged mail ballots, in contrast with roughly 1.four million Republicans, largely due to a Democratic push to vote remotely amid the pandemic and Mr. Trump’s false assaults on the follow. (The former president and his household, nonetheless, voted by mail in Florida in the June 2020 main.)

Given that historical past in Florida, its invoice will act as a singular take a look at of the nationwide Republican push to curtail voting entry, particularly absentee and mail voting. And the G.O.P. effort carries dangers: Was the Democratic surge in mail balloting an indication of a brand new regular for the beforehand Republican-dominated voting methodology, or a blip attributable to the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic?

The laws has already develop into something of a political balancing act, as state Republicans attempt to appease a Trump-friendly base hungry for brand new voting limits whereas not harming the occasion’s turnout. In 2022, the state is poised to but once more develop into a marquee political battleground as Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, and Mr. DeSantis search re-election.

Democrats in the Legislature seized on Republicans’ justification for the invoice.

“So what’s the problem that we’re trying to fix?” Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democratic consultant from Orlando, requested rhetorically. “Oh, here’s the problem: Florida Democrats cast 600,000 more vote-by-mail ballots.”

But Republicans defended the invoice, saying that it was fashionable with “our constituents” and noting that voting choices in Florida had been nonetheless way more intensive than in different states. Florida will nonetheless have no-excuse absentee voting and can mandate at the very least eight days of early voting.

“If the opposition says that we are creating barriers to voting, those barriers already exist in other states,” stated Blaise Ingoglia, a Republican state consultant from Hernando County who helped lead the push for the invoice. “But we never hear a peep from the opposition about those laws.”

Other Republican legislators echoed language utilized by Mr. Trump and his allies throughout their challenges to the 2020 election.

“I believe that every legal vote should count,” stated Travis Hutson, a Republican senator from Northeast Florida. “I believe one fraudulent vote is one too many. And I’m trying to protect the sanctity of our elections.”

Data requested by lawmakers themselves recommended there was no use for the laws. The Republican-led House Public Integrity and Elections Committee surveyed the state’s 67 election supervisors in February, asking them about previous elections. Almost all the supervisors responded and stated that, over the previous 4 years, that they had reported only a few cases of doable fraud — one in every of lawmakers’ acknowledged causes for pushing the laws — and that almost all of their drop containers had been already monitored, via both bodily or video surveillance, public data present.

“It seems like the Legislature is ignoring — I would say deliberately ignoring — the facts that they have in their possession,” stated Stephen F. Rosenthal of Miami, who’s a part of a bunch of Democratic attorneys that requested the data. The group additionally queried elected state prosecutors about voter fraud, discovering a minuscule variety of prosecuted instances.

The supervisors’ solutions to the House committee additionally revealed that election supervisors had acquired thousands and thousands of {dollars} in grant funding from exterior organizations in 2019 and 2020. That cash will now be prohibited, with no apparent substitute for it in the long run.

Republicans, when pressed for particulars on any reported fraud that might immediate the necessity for the invoice, typically demurred.

“I don’t know, but I’m sure it was going on,” Mr. Ingoglia responded to a query on the House ground about any reported cases of unlawful poll assortment. “Just the fact that they weren’t caught doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not happening.”

The invoice was not with out criticism from notable Republicans inside and outdoors the Legislature. D. Alan Hays, a conservative Republican who had beforehand served in the State Senate for 12 years and is now the election supervisor in Lake County, told his former colleagues at a legislative listening to final month that their invoice was a “travesty.”

The new invoice is more likely to face authorized challenges from Democrats; hours after Gov. Brian Kemp signed Georgia’s voting invoice into legislation, a coalition of Democrats and civil rights teams filed a federal lawsuit difficult its legality.

Democrats in the Florida Legislature centered closely on the invoice’s potential influence on communities of coloration.

“Typically, in communities of color, households are very diverse,” stated State Representative Bobby DuBose, the minority chief, taking problem with the restriction that claims an individual may gather solely two absentee ballots from different voters to carry and drop off at a polling location. “And so, if the intent was to add two — and in many households, there are more than two — why the number two and why not expand beyond two if your intent was to open up the accessibility to voting?”

Mr. Ingoglia stated he believed permitting two ballots per individual was enough, however Democrats disagreed, likening the rule to racially discriminatory legal guidelines of the previous. Over and over, they framed the invoice as an answer in search of an issue.

One Democratic consultant, Fentrice Driskell of Tampa, framed the controversy as just like the hunt for the chupacabra, the legendary, nightmarish mammal-gobbling and goat-blood-sucking beast.

“Members, I’ve got no evidence for you on the chupacabra, and I got no evidence for you about ballot harvesting,” Ms. Driskell stated. “But what I can tell you is this: that our system worked well in 2020, by all accounts, and everyone agreed. And that for so many reasons, we don’t need this bad bill.”