Why do I get the uneasy feeling that Florida is about to be at the center of a presidential voting scandal again this year? Haven't we made any progress since 2000?
The unease is fed by some reports in Florida media over the past month making it clear that having a simple, clean election is no easy task in the Sunshine State.
Less than a decade ago, you could take the simple act of voting for granted. Drive down to the polling place, get in a short line and punch your ballot.
How easy and reliable it was.
This year's election will bring not only expected huge turnouts for the Obama-McCain main event but the third voting technology in the past three presidential elections. Hundreds of thousands of new voters, many of them young or black Obama supporters, signed up in a massive voter registration drive by that campaign, could head to the polls for the first time, facing optical-scan ballots that very few in Florida are accustomed to.
So what are the chances things will go smoothly?
Consider these developments:
• Vote tallying was delayed for several hours in the Hillsborough primary in August because of a software glitch.
• A Palm Beach county judicial race dragged on for weeks as elections officials tried to account for what they thought were thousands of missing ballots from the primary election there. The outcome is now being contested in court.
• A Republican mailer to Democratic voters in several Florida counties raised suspicions that the GOP was getting ready to repeat the "caging" that it did in 2004, a tricky attempt to disqualify already-registered voters who have moved by sending mail to their addresses and purging them from voting rolls if it is returned as undeliverable.
• Rumors flying around (with the help of the Internet and one uninformed major newspaper editorial in South Florida) that voters would not be able to vote at their polling places if their addresses didn't match those on the registration rolls, or that anyone wearing an Obama or McCain T-shirt would not be admitted to vote.
Some level of uncertainty is to be expected given all the changes for this year's election.
"Every time you change technology, especially without any testing, you just never know," said Ellen Deutsch Taylor, a Tarpon Springs lawyer with the Florida Democratic Lawyers Council, which is hoping to staff every precinct with a trained poll watcher on Election Day. "We've got our fingers crossed."
After 2000, punch cards were out; touchscreen was in. Then 2004 brought the push for a paper trail. Touchscreen was out; optical scan ballots are in.
The Council is part of a massive legal effort to ensure that Democratic votes are counted, one so far-reaching — it hopes to recruit 5,000 lawyers statewide to watch the November balloting — that it has already drawn notice from the state's GOP chairman, Jim Greer. He bitched about them in a letter to Democratic Party officials and warned that the lawyers better not harass any Republicans.
Democratic Party chairwoman Karen Thurman's response: "For the past several weeks Democratic senior citizens across Florida have been receiving letters from John McCain and the Republican National Committee. As newspapers across Florida have reported, this effort looks very similar to the 2004 efforts by the [Republican Party of Florida, the Republican National Committee], and Bush-Cheney Campaign to cage voters as your party prepared to challenge their right to vote on Election Day. In other states we see Republicans going after folks who have lost their homes from this economic crisis. We hope that your party is not planning such actions, but as we educate our poll watchers and election protection teams, we should both include information about how under Florida law it is a crime to frivolously challenge voters."
The war of words is already on.
"We intend to be fair," Taylor said. "We're just trying to identify issues that prevent our voters from voting. We want to make sure that people aren't turned away from the polls."
The real battleground in this year's election is Florida's controversial "No Match, No Vote" law, which the state's appointed Republican secretary of state decided to enforce a month ago, after a court case that had halted it for three years was ended.
Here's how No-Match works: When you register to vote, the way you write your name has to match government databases of Social Security and driver license numbers precisely (no nicknames, no misspellings on either your voter application or in the database) or the registration attempt is invalid. Elections officials say they can resolve typos and nickname issues by manually checking the applications.
But that is happening a lot. In just a month, registrations for 5,000 new registrants have been held up (temporarily, elections officials hope) as elections workers double-checked them. Advocates of the No-Match law say it is designed to prevent voter fraud.
Secretary of State Kurt Browning wrote in a statewide media advisory, "The courts have held that the Voter Verification law is valid because the state has a 'compelling' interest to have accurate voter rolls. And despite what others have said, the state provided examples of fraudulent applications that had come through the system because the law had been temporarily stopped."
But civil rights advocates are on target when they characterize the strict matching procedures in the law as a means of disenfranchising new voters, especially minorities.
And since most new voters are Democrats (540,000 new Democrat registration vs. 350,000 new Republicans across the state), the majority of those voters being challenged under No Match are (ta-dah!) Democrats.
Voting officials point out that No-Match doesn't affect anybody who was already registered to vote, despite rumors across the state that if your picture ID doesn't match the voting rolls, you would be denied a chance to vote at your precinct.
Just what do you need to do to make sure that your vote counts? If you are already registered to vote, it's pretty simple: Bring one form of picture ID that has your signature on it to your polling place.
Once you check in, you will be given a paper ballot that requires you to fill in the bubble next to the candidate you want to choose. Once you are done, you will go to an optical scanning machine, where your ballot will be recorded. You're done.
If you are not yet registered to vote, you are shut out. Florida closed the books for the Nov. 4 election on Monday (Oct. 6).
If you are one of the thousands of people who registered to vote for the first time in the past 30 days and your registration has not gone through, contact the supervisor of elections office or your local political party for help. You may be asked by the local elections office to provide a photocopy of your ID by mail or fax or in person. If the elections office makes a match to government databases after manually reviewing the registration application, the voter is all set to go. If not, that person can still vote by a provisional ballot but then has only a few days after the election to clear up the ID problem.
Call your Supervisor of Elections in your home county if you have further questions. Their numbers:
• Hillsborough County, 813-272-5850
• Manatee County, 941-741-3823
• Pinellas County, 727-464-6108
• Sarasota County, 941-861-8600
Oh, and make sure you get out and vote no matter what.
Brian Blair billboard update: Last week I wrote about the unusual circumstances and questions surrounding a campaign billboard for Hillsborough County Commissioner Brian Blair. The billboard had not shown up on his campaign finance reports, and CL obtained an invoice that showed the billboard in August was billed to a developer with close ties to Blair.
After our story was published, Blair told the St. Petersburg Times that he paid for the billboard on Ehrlich Road and produced a copy of a check for $2,500 for the billboard, which was dated Sept. 19.
Blair has sublet the billboard from the company that has a contract for it, North Dale Development, which is owned by developer and Blair supporter Stephen Dibbs.
Creative Loafing began calling Blair and Dibbs on Sept. 23, and, despite repeated attempts, did not receive a response from them about who had paid for the billboard. An August invoice for the billboard, obtained by CL, was sent to North Dale Development, and the billboard itself makes reference to voting for Blair in the August primary.
According to the Times: "Blair's campaign produced a check stub showing a $2,500, first-month's payment to CBS Outdoor, owner of the billboard. CBS also provided a computerized copy of the check, along with a copy of a mailing label from the DHL Express envelope in which it arrived.
"CBS spokesman Jeremy Murphy said a company called North Dale Development has a contract to use the billboard, and that it has sublet the advertising space to Blair's campaign. Blair has access to the billboard from the Aug. 26 to. Nov. 4, Murphy said. Those dates span the period from the primary to the general election."
Blair's latest campaign report is due this week, and I will update this story again after looking at his expenditures for billboards.
This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2008.