Florida to enforce restrictive 'No-Match No-Vote' law
FLORIDA -- Today voting rights advocates expressed alarm over the Secretary of State’s September 8th decision to enforce the state’s “no-match, no-vote” law, a voter registration law that previously blocked more than 16,000 eligible Florida citizens from registering to vote, through no fault of their own, and could disenfranchise tens of thousands more voters in November.
Secretary of State Browning’s last-minute decision to implement the law in the final month before the registration deadline will pose a significant hurdle to eligible Florida citizens hoping to register and vote in November. It will disenfranchise voters who do not send or bring a photocopy of their driver’s license to county election officials’ offices after voting, even if these voters showed poll workers their driver’s licenses at the polls on Election Day.
“This 11th-hour decision is an ill-advised move to apply a policy the state has never enforced in its current form, at a time when registration activity is at its highest,” said Alvaro Fernandez of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, a plaintiff in the case. “The Secretary’s decision will put thousands of real Florida citizens at risk due to bureaucratic typos that under the ‘no-match, no-vote’ law will prevent them from voting this November,” continued Fernandez.
“Voters who do everything right, who submit forms that are complete, timely, and accurate, will suddenly find themselves unregistered when they go to vote, just because someone somewhere punched the wrong letter on a keyboard,” said Myrna Pérez, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“The no match, no vote policy is unjust and unnecessary, and Florida voters will pay the price this fall,” stated Jean-Robert Lafortune, president of the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, another plaintiff in the lawsuit.
The law at issue bars any Florida citizen from becoming registered to vote and voting with a regular ballot if the state cannot validate the applicant’s driver’s license number or the last four digits of the applicant’s Social Security number, no matter how much identification the voter brings to the polls on Election Day. The process starts with an attempt to “match” voter information to other government databases, an error-prone exercise that often fails. For example, the Social Security Administration reports a 46% failure rate when trying to match voter registration applications. State officials admitted in a recent challenge to the law, Florida NAACP v. Browning, that typographical errors by election workers are responsible for most of the failures.
If the state cannot match the voter registration records, many eligible voters who submit registration applications before the October 6th deadline to register may not be notified of the matching failure until Election Day, when they appear at the polls to vote. There, they will be forced to cast a provisional ballot, and that provisional ballot will only be counted if the voter submits a photocopy of his or her driver’s license or Social Security card within 48 hours after the election, even if they already showed their driver’s license at the polls.
“The most senseless part is that the state creates these errors, and then makes it unnecessarily hard to fix the problem,” said Myrna Pérez of the Brennan Center. “If the state insists on enforcing this misguided matching provision, it should at least make it possible for voters to show their driver’s license at the poll and validate their registration then and there. To have registered, brought your ID to the polls, and still be told you can’t vote – all because of a bureaucratic error – is ridiculous.”
“It is unfortunate that the Secretary of State decided to enforce the statute less than a month before registration deadline. It is really the 11th hour and is certain to derail the applications of eligible voters. At the very least, counties can and should help to avoid needless disenfranchisement of eligible voters by permitting voters to correct the problem at the polls. In addition, we strongly urge groups that conduct voter registration drives to ask applicants to submit their driver’s license number (not Social Security number) on their application, which will reduce the likelihood that their application will be rejected for lack of a ‘match,’” urged Elizabeth Westfall of Advancement Project, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs.
“In 2006 alone, more than 12,800 citizens submitting complete and timely forms were kept off of the rolls, and the volume of registration in 2006 is nothing like what we anticipate in this presidential year,” said Robert Atkins, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, also representing plaintiffs. 2006 was a year of unusually low voter registration rates in Florida because of a separate law that shut down voter registration drives that year. “With the huge number of registration forms pouring in at the end of the registration period, county officials may not be able to fix problems that will cause thousands of eligible voters to be disenfranchised,” Atkins added.
The Secretary of State’s announcement Monday poses the latest obstacle to eligible Florida voters seeking to register before the 2008 elections.
In June, a federal trial court in Gainesville, Florida, refused to stop the “no-match, no-vote” law in Florida NAACP vs. Browning after challenges from several voter advocacy organizations. The case was filed in September 2007 by the Florida branch of the NAACP, the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. The plaintiffs are represented by The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law; Advancement Project; Project Vote; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP; and Greenberg Traurig LLP.
In December 2007, the Gainesville federal court granted a preliminary injunction against the no-match, no-vote law under two federal statutes, ruling that Florida’s law “makes it harder to vote by imposing a matching requirement that is a barrier to voter registration.”
The ruling’s criticism of the no match, no vote law prompted the state legislature to revise portions of the statute – eliminating untenable distinctions between typos made by voters and those made by election officials, and standardizing the notice sent to voters kept off the rolls. Still, voting rights advocates argue that the law’s core burdens remain.
In April, the trial court’s original decision was overturned in a split decision from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, following an appeal by the Florida Secretary of State. Plaintiffs in the case returned to the federal trial court to challenge the amended law under the federal constitution, but on remand, the court refused to enjoin the law, citing the changes that the legislature had made to the statute.
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