Florida’s 2008 Election Landscape Looking More Like 2000

[babylonsister]

Florida’s 2008 Election Landscape Looking More Like 2000

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted June 28, 2008.

A court ruling means processing errors by local election officials can be cause to reject new voters.


A little-noticed federal appeals court ruling this week could lead to thousands of Floridians showing up to vote in November only to be told their names are not on voter lists.

"It really penalizes voters through no fault of their own," said Ion Sancho, election supervisor for Leon County, Florida, where Tallahassee the state capital is located. "It strikes me as absolutely Kafkaesque."

At issue is Florida's so-called "no-match, no-vote" law, which allows county officials to reject new voter registration applications if the names on the forms do not match other state databases. Voter advocacy groups sued the state, claiming that database errors can cause applications to be rejected -- through no fault of would-be voters.

This week, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida sided with the state, saying it has the right to reject voter applications if names didn't match an applicant's Florida driver's license or the last four digits of their social security number. The state had been sued by a coalition of voting rights groups after election officials rejected applications from 14,000 African-American Floridians dating back to 2006.

"This ruling puts thousands of real Florida citizens at risk this November based on bureaucratic typos," stated Justin Levitt, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, who argued on behalf of the would-be voters.

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http://www.alternet.org/democracy/89760/

[livvy]

1. This is so wrong.

No one's voter registration should be denied without absolute verification that the application is faulty. No one should have their right to vote denied, if they are who they say they are, and they have some sort of ID to prove it. Applications should not be rejected unless they have a damn good reason for rejecting it, and that means doing an investigation to prove it. The burden of proof should rest with the SoS office that wants to purge someone from the voter rolls, not with the person who applies. And if there is any question, that person should be contacted/notified before they can be denied the right to vote.

It is such a sham. How many people would make the effort to vote fraudulently?