Brennan Center of Justice vs. Florida

I hope the Brennan Center for Justice is able to strike down Florida's bogus voter fraud law.

Florida and a handful of other states refuse to place eligible citizens on the rolls unless they clear a series of extra bureaucratic hurdles largely dependent on “matching” registration information on a new statewide voter list with information in the state motor vehicle or Social Security systems. Common database errors, however, make “matching” unreliable, jeopardizing the status of up to 30% of new voters. A 2006 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, one of the voting rights groups that brought today’s suit, found that such a procedure misinterpreted the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which told states to create the statewide lists.

Plaintiffs today argued that there are several ways the bureaucratic process, embodied in Florida’s state law (Subsection 6 of Section 97.053), will disenfranchise tens of thousands of eligible voters in the 2008 election cycle, especially in trying to match registration forms with Social Security information. A citizen registering as “Bill” might not “match” if his Social Security number is issued under “William”; a woman’s married name might not match against a database that has her maiden name. Common data entry errors also cause matches to fail. According to court documents in a 2006 Washington State case, in which the Brennan Center challenged a similar state law, one woman was barred from the rolls when her birthday was mistakenly entered into the system as “1976” instead of “1975”.

The NAACP and the American Grassroots Coalition have filed suit over Subsection 6 of Section 97.053 of Florida voting law that is designed to make it more difficult for people to vote.

Voters must provide Social Security an driver's licence as proof of ID. If they can't, voters are provided with a provisional ballot. The Supervisor of Elections must approve it for the vote to count. There is a fat chance in hell they will go to the trouble. I went to motor vechicle to renew my ID and was told they have no record of me ever being in Florida. I have lived in the state since 1987. Apparently, I don't exist.

I wrote an old entry in 2004 about the unreliability of Florida's voting rolls.

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If anyone wonders how Florida can keep making mistakes after the embarrassment that was the 2000 presidential election you have to understand that this is a state that convicts five year-old boys for cocaine possession. For some reason this little tyke is 6'4 and 220 pounds. This is also a state where a sex offender's race can magically go from hispanic to white.

As we all know, the Florida Felons List had "almost no Hispanic names." Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood maintained that this was because that Florida Department of Law Enforcement database doesn't have a Hispanic catagory. It's not suppose to. For online searches for Florida felons you would have to go to the Florida Department of Corrections since they are the government agency that processes all the state's felons. There you will find "race" in the top right corner and when you pull the bar down you will see that hispanic is listed. So as Jimbecile correctly pointed out at MonkeyFilter, Hood's answer is nothing more than clever spin.

One page 61 of the Department of Florida Department of Law Enforcement's Uniform Crime Reports Guide Manual states law enforcement officers should fill out arrest reports like this.

Name (Last, First, Middle) - Record the last name, first name, middle name (please do not provide an

initial for the middle name). If applicable, record the suffix abbreviations used to distinguish between fathers and sons (Jr., Sr., III, etc.). Please ensure that the complete name is provided. Race - Record the appropriate race from those listed below in this field.

W - White
I - American Indian
B - Black
O Oriental/Asian

Now here's the kicker. If you didn't click the Uniform Crime Reports Guide Manual link before you should do so now. On the first page it says it states, "Updated November 2000."

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This is part of the Republican Party's disenfranchising poor and minority voters they believe will lean Democrat. This is a plan that has been pushed by Karl Rove and led to US Attorneys being dismissed. Rove's philosophy about democracy is more Boss Tweed than Jeffersonian.