Thread: FL-Tougher ID rules may disqualify some voters

September 11, 2008


Tougher new Florida ID rules could disqualify some voters

By DARA KAM
The Palm Beach Post

TALLAHASSEE — Having their vote count on Election Day just got a little tougher for newly registered voters in Florida.

Secretary of State Kurt Browning put the state's 2005 "no match, no vote" law into effect Monday, less than a month before the Oct. 6 deadline to register to vote in the Nov. 4 general election.

That means the voter registration information for anyone who signed up Monday or later must match identification information in other government databases. If, by Nov. 4, the state can't make the match or the person can't prove that the registration information is correct with a driver license or Social Security card, the voter will get only a provisional ballot on Election Day.

And that's only if the voter has the proper ID at the polls.

The voter will have two days after Election Day to prove his or her case, or the provisional vote won't count.

In a presidential election year when voter rolls have grown by 400,000 and are expected to add thousands more, voting rights activists said the decision could disenfranchise those new voters, most of them Democrats.

"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," Alvaro Fernandez, of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, told The Miami Herald.

Fernandez's group, along with the NAACP and the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, challenged the law in 2007 and won an injunction in December, but the state won a reversal on appeal in June in federal district court in Atlanta. The ruling became final on July 28 but was not enforced during registration for the Aug. 26 primary.

"It's another needless, unnecessary burden on the right to vote that Florida is imposing," said Elizabeth Westfall, senior attorney with the Washington-based Advancement Project, a civil rights organization that challenged the law on behalf of the groups.

In 2006 and 2007, the law blocked more than 12,000 voters from registering, Westfall said. Black and Latino voter applications were disproportionately rejected, she said, because they frequently had double or hyphenated last names that the database did not recognize.

Browning, a former Pasco County supervisor of elections who was appointed to his state position by Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, said he delayed implementation of the law until after the primary to give supervisors time to make changes to their computer systems and because registration had closed by the time the court order became final.

He also acknowledged that the court case prompted state legislators to make changes this year to the law, which originally was passed to prevent voter fraud, and said he gets "steamed up" by complaints.

"Folks ... continue to stir this up, and they think it's wrong simply because they don't like it. That's it in a nutshell," he said. "They don't like it, therefore it's wrong. I'm telling you it's not wrong. You've had a district court and an appellate court and the United States Department of Justice that have signed off on that. It's good. It's valid.

"They want to keep the hysteria moved up. They want to keep everybody agitated. They want to make sure that nobody has confidence in their systems."

But if the system doesn't work, elections experts say it could especially affect Democrats. Presidential candidate Barack Obama has made bringing new voters to the polls one of his campaign strategies, and many of the voters he has encouraged to sign up are minorities.

Of the 400,000 new voters registered in Florida this year, about two-thirds are Democrats.

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"Folks ... continue to stir this up, and they think it's wrong simply because they don't like it. That's it in a nutshell," he said. "They don't like it, therefore it's wrong. I'm telling you it's not wrong. You've had a district court and an appellate court and the United States Department of Justice that have signed off on that. It's good. It's valid.

If its the law then it is to protect citizens and the country. I notice its only the civil rights attorneys and immigrants right advocates that are fighting against protecting our votes. Now why would that be?

But if the system doesn't work, elections experts say it could especially affect Democrats. Presidential candidate Barack Obama has made bringing new voters to the polls one of his campaign strategies, and many of the voters he has encouraged to sign up are minorities.

Hahahahaha! SOME Illegal aliens wont be able to vote. Poor Obama. He was counting on the illegal alien vote, BECAUSE ANYONE WITH BRAINS WOULDNT ELECT HIM.

The link didn't work

here's a collection of links:

http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/searc ... censes+&c=

Oops! And I do a lot of those.

Here is where I found it:
http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs..../80911011/1075