30 Florida counties won't follow state's voter ID suggestion

[madfloridian]

This is the No Match No Vote law which Browning decided to enforce just 3 weeks before the election, an almost impossible task for the elections supervisors.

Sounds like the county supervisors are rebelling.

From the Miami Herald:

30 Florida counties won't follow state's voter ID suggestion

Florida's Broward and Miami-Dade counties have announced that they will buck the state's recommendations for handling voters flagged by the controversial Florida Voter Verification Law on election day, streamlining the process to require less paperwork from challenged voters. The state's final unverified list, released Monday, leaves the voting status of more than 12,000 newly registered voters in limbo unless they can clear up identification mismatches in driver's license and Social Security databases.

Miami-Dade ranked at the top of the list, with nearly a quarter of the so-called ''no match'' voters. Broward, with 13 percent, ranked No. 3, just behind Orange County. Statewide, Hispanics and blacks outnumbered non-Hispanics by more than three to one -- and by nearly six to one in South Florida. Democrats outnumbered Republicans about four to one statewide and in South Florida.

The ''no-match'' law, temporarily suspended a year ago after a lawsuit by voting and civil rights groups, applies only to 437,638 residents who registered since Sept. 8. A political rift has erupted over enforcing it.

Some are modifying with common sense.

..."Broward will still require a provisional ballot, but if a voter brings copies of a driver's license or Social Security card, that information will be attached to the ballot and no further action would be required by the voter.

''You do not need to do anything further,'' she said. `You have complied with the request to provide proof of identification.''

At least 30 counties are offering similar one-stop options. Miami-Dade's process goes further, allowing unverified voters to use a regular ballot, which can't later be contested, if they supply copies of ID proof"

[HopeFor2006]

1. Good on them!

:woohoo:

[GetTheRightVote]

2. I was worried about these new rules, thank you Florida

We must not allow Repubs to harm our elections from this election on ...

[FLyellowdog]

3. Thank goodness SOMEONE down here has some sense.

[SwampG8r]

4. i have voted in brevard county florida since 1974

have had to show an id every time
i actually support a positive id before voting and dont mind showing mine

[madfloridian]

5. This is about more than just showing ID. Time article shows dangers.

Disenfranchisement by typo

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1853246_1853243_1853233,00.html?imw=Y

"In Wisconsin, an August check of a new voter-registration database against other state records turned up a 22% match-failure rate. Around the time four of the six former judges who oversee state elections could not be matched with state driver's license data, the board decided to suspend any database purges of new registrants. But database-matching continues elsewhere. In Florida, nearly 9,000 new registrants have been flagged through the state's "No Match, No Vote" law. (Their votes will not be counted unless they prove their identity to a state worker in the coming weeks.) In Ohio, Republicans have repeatedly gone to court to make public a list of more than 200,000 unmatched registrations, presumably so that those voters can be challenged at the polls, even though most of them, like Joe, are probably legit. "It's disenfranchisement by typo," explains Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks voting issues.

Elsewhere the purges are peremptory. A county official in Georgia this year removed 700 people from voter lists, even though some of those people had never received so much as a parking ticket. Another Georgia voter purge, which seeks to remove illegal immigrants from the rolls, has been challenged by voting-rights groups that say legal voters have been intimidated by repeated requests to prove their citizenship. Back in Mississippi last March, an election official wrongly purged 10,000 people from the voting rolls — including a Republican congressional candidate — while using her home computer. (The names were restored before the primary.)

With just days until the election, the scale of the database-purge problem is unknown. Millions have been stripped from voter rolls in key states, but the legitimacy of those eliminations remains unclear. The sheer volume of state voter checks against the federal Social Security Administration database, however, has raised concerns. Six states that are heavily using the federal database were recently warned by Social Security commissioner Michael Astrue about the danger of improperly blocking legitimate voters. "It is absolutely essential that people entitled to register to vote are allowed to do so," he said in October."

[madfloridian]

6. Just think about attaching a copy of your Social Security card to a ballot.

When did they start insisting on using the Social Security database? I've been registered so many years that I don't remember what was required.

That is making stuff pretty public.