FL Courting Electoral Trouble

According to independent elections experts at Pew’s Electionline.org and other organizations, it is now harder to vote in FL than in nearly every other state in the nation. Some critics predict that tens of thousands of potential voters will be kept off the rolls — many of them poor, black or Hispanic.

Three laws in particular are at issue, including a “no match, no vote” measure, rejecting potential voters whose Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers did not match state databases; the provision managing voter registration drives conducted by third parties, like the League of Women Voters, FL plans to enforce strict deadlines and fines of up to $1,000 for groups that lose voter registration forms or turn them in late; and a law that would keep a voter from correcting mistakes or omissions on a registration form in the final month before an election and would bar that person from having his or her vote counted.

Two recent federal rulings have gone in the state’s favor.

On March 25, a Federal District Court in Miami rejected a challenge to the provision on corrections and omissions. An oversight can be as simple as failing to check what many Florida residents call the “crazy box.” It asks people to affirm: “I have not been adjudicated mentally incapacitated with respect to voting or, if I have, my competency has been restored.” So far, about 3 percent of voter registrations collected by the Florida chapter of Acorn, a national organizing group, have lacked the required checkmarks.

In the second decision, on April 3, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, sent a case challenging the “no match, no vote” law back to a Federal District Court, reversing an earlier injunction without ruling whether the law was unconstitutional.

Other states, meanwhile, have been moving in the opposite direction. Now, 33 states allow voters to amend forms after their registration deadlines. In 2006, a judge in Washington State struck down a “no match, no vote” law, and at least six other states have abandoned similar provisions.

Election lawyers say Florida’s Republican-controlled government has introduced more restrictions on the voting process than other states since 2000 and has fought harder to keep them. Critics say state officials are subtly trying to block new voters, many of whom tend to vote for Democrats, from participating. “It’s really about politicians trying to game the system,” said Michael Slater, deputy director of Project Vote, a voting rights organization based in Arkansas. “They’ve done that by adding all these bureaucratic obstacles to voting, and then when people can’t jump over them, they blame the voter.”

Michael H. Drucker
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