law that rejected mail ballots where signatures on the ballot envelope did not match signatures in files; in 2016 a court struck down the law. In 2014, Scott blocked a request by the city of Gainesville to use a facility at the University of Florida as a site for early voting. In July 2018, a judge ruled against Scott's prohibition of early voting on campus, saying the ban showed a "stark pattern of discrimination." In 2013, Scott ordered Pinellas County to close down sites where voters could submit mail ballots. In 2012, a court ruled that Scott could not place heavy fines on groups that registered voters but failed to submit the registrations within 48 hours. Scott rolled back automatic restoration of rights for nonviolent crimes, giving former felons a five- to six-year waiting period before they can apply for a restoration of voting rights. Of the approximately 30,000 applications from former felons to have their voting rights restored during his tenure, Scott approved approximately 3,000. A 2018 investigation by the Palm Beach Post found that during his governorship, Scott restored the voting rights of three times as many white men as black men, and that blacks accounted only for 27% of those granted voting rights despite blacks being 43% of those released from state prisons in the past 20 years. The percentage of blacks among those whose voting rights were restored was the lowest in more than 50 years, and Scott restored a higher share of Republican voting rights than Democrat voting rights than in almost 50 years. A clemency board set up by Scott held hearings on applications, but there were no standards on how to judge the worthiness of individual applications. In March 2017, seven former felons filed a class action lawsuit arguing that the clemency board's decisions were inconsistent, vague and political. In February 2018, a U.S. District Court described Scott's process as arbitrary and unconstitutional, and ruled that he had to create a new process to restore felons' voting rights. The ruling said that Scott and his clemency board had "unfettered discretion" to deny voting rights "for any reason," and that "to vote again, disenfranchised citizens must kowtow before a panel of high-level government officials over which Florida's governor has absolute veto authority. No standards guide the panel. Its members alone must be satisfied that these citizens deserve restoration." The Brennan Center for Justice described