Today the voting rights activist group the Advancement Project released a new report on what they say are significant electoral problems and voting barriers in Florida that disenfranchised "an untold" number of voters in last year's election, and could lead to further problems in 2010.
The Washington-based group is still involved in a legal challenge to the state's controversial "no match, no vote" registration law that requires voter identification information to match state driving records.
The group says the law prevented over 16,000 applicants from getting on voting rolls in 2006 and 2007. Secretary of State Kurt Browning did not enforce the law until September of '08, which the Advancement Projct say then prevented over 11,000 people- mostly minorities- from voting in last year's presidential race.
The group also is calling for expanding the amount of hours and sites for early voting in the state.
Carolyn Thompson , Florida Voter Protection Advocate, discussed in a conference call with reporters the randomness of the early voting laws by comparing Hillsborough with neighboring Pinellas County.
She said that Hillsborough had 13 early voting sites in 2008, for over 700,000 registered voters, while Pinellas, with 643,424 voters, had only 3 early sites (which was the source of controversy last year).
Advancement Project officials also referred to legislation being sponsored by Broward County State Senator Nan Rich that would amend the early voting laws to provide more flexibility for supervisors of elections, and establish a mininum number of early voting hours per county.
And the group says far too many Floridians were handed provisionally ballots last year. Provisionally ballots came into existence with the HAVA Act of 2002. Provisional ballots are used when a poll worker determines that there is a problem with the registration of a voter, and instead of denying him or her a vote, has them vote provisionally. Those votes are not counted on the night of the election.
A spokesman for Secretary of State Kurt Browning, Jennifer Krell Davis, tells the Palm Beach Post that, “The Department (of State) received no reports of anyone not being able to vote because of ‘no match. We think it worked the way it was supposed to."
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2009.
