Dispatch #2 From The Sunshine State Battleground–Florida Says To New Voters: No Match No Vote

If the presidential race in Florida is as close as it was in 2000 there may be new reason for concern.

The state announced a new “no match” list this week that included over 12,000 names of newly registered voters whose identities cannot be verified, and who therefore will likely be ineligible to vote. While that’s just a fraction of the 438,000 new voters registered here since September 8, the fact that a disproportionate number of them are African-Americans, Hispanics, and Democrats, has watchdog groups crying foul.

Controversy has been brewing ever since the Republican-dominated state Congress introduced the no match law during this election year, requiring new voters to provide a driver’s license or Social Security number that matches state records, despite little evidence of voter fraud in the state.

A federal lawsuit brought by the Florida NAACP opposes the law. A similar lawsuit failed to make a difference in June, though state officials in the case admitted that typographical errors by election workers were the largest reason for matching discrepancies. The greatest number of reported no matches is in Miami-Dade County, which also has the largest number of Hispanics with names whose spelling may seem unfamiliar to white election workers in other parts of the state.

Under the existing no match law, voters on the no match list who show up at the polls face the onerous task of filing a provisional ballot and documenting their ID with a state election office within two days of the election, even if they are able to provide identification at a polling station. In direct opposition to Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning’s attempt to enforce the law, some local election supervisors have pledged to resolve matching issues at polling places, rather than elections offices.

In Pinellas County (in Tampa Bay), Republican supervisor Deborah Clark has been engaged in a high profile spat with Browning ever since she announced she would take such action. Her decision was applauded by the ACLU, despite an otherwise poor record of job performance. It was Clark’s decision to reduce the number of early voting locations to just 3 in Pinellas County, that has lead to long waits and accusations of overt partisanship given the rising popularity of early voting, which tends to be favored by Democratic voters.

In a letter dated Oct. 8, several prominent Florida Democrats urged Governor Charlie Crist to suspend the no match law altogether pending the NAACP lawsuit. So far Crist, who was on the short list of Senator John McCain’s choices for a running mate, has declined to take action.

F. Timothy Martin is a freelance writer residing in Tampa Bay, Florida.