Screwing Minority Voters in Florida 2006 – Katherine Harris Style

autorank

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Thu Oct-12-06 02:28 PM
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Screwing Minority Voters in Florida 2006 – Katherine Harris Style

Edited on Thu Oct-12-06 02:52 PM by autorank

The backbone of VOTER SUPPRESSION has always been the registration process – literacy tests, poll taxes, and the like have a long, reliable history of keeping “certain “voters out of the voting booth – namely minority voters and the poor. This year, we’ve got the Help America Vote Act which is set up to push people off the rolls. How? You ask, well read about it below.

Another outrage from the land of Katherine Harris and the famous 2000 Florida Registration Purge. This took over 50,000 black Floridians off the rolls and cost Gore the election. No theory here, it’s a fact.

Stop this now. If you’re in Florida, get this to your local Democratic Party and tell them the deal and ask them to get you an answer.

http://www.advancementproject.org/index.html

For Immediate Release http://tinyurl.com/ltm6h
Contact: Sabrina Williams 202/728-9557 or 305/904-3960

FLORIDA’S LATEST VOTER SUPPRESSION SCHEME
“NO MATCH. NO VOTE”

(Tallahassee, Florida, September 20, 2006)—Today, Advancement Project and other voter protection groups sent a letter to Florida Secretary of State, Sue Cobb, expressing concern about a state statue which prohibits acceptance of a voter registration application unless the applicant’s identification number matches a number in a statewide database and requires that applicants whose identification number has not been verified to vote by provisional ballot.

Florida matching requirements have been causing problems for thousands of eligible voters. For example, a citizen registering as “William” might not “match” if his driver’s license is issued under “Bill”; a woman’s married name might not match against an outdated database containing her maiden name. Moreover, common data entry errors cause matches to fail. According to court documents in a recent Washington case, one woman was barred from the rolls when her birthday was mistakenly entered into the system as “1976” instead of “1975”.

“This seems eerily reminiscent of the notorious felon purge in 2000, which also attempted to use technology to match 2 different databases, with horrendous results,” said Penda Hair, co-director, Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization. “Florida officials seem determined to commit, in plain sight, 6 weeks before the election, another version of the same vote suppression game.”

Florida Supervisors of Elections have refused to register a large percentage of otherwise eligible registrants based on the state’s purported inability to verify the applicant’s identifying number (i.e. the driver’s license number, social security number, or Florida identification card number.) In a sample of 606 voter registration applications submitted to the Miami Dade Supervisor’s office, Advancement Project and Project Vote found that 135 applicants had not been registered.

According to the codes in the statewide voter registration database, approximately 63 percent of those 135 applicants had not been registered because the state was unable to verify their identification number. Considering only the first-time registrants (i.e. the applicants subjected to this matching requirement) in this sample of 606 applicants, approximately 27 percent were not added to the registration rolls because the state was unable to match their identification number.

“Florida’s law is inconsistent with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and in fact is prohibited by both HAVA and the Voting Rights Act,” said Jennifer Maranzano, staff attorney, Advancement Project. “Florida’s ill-conceived policies concerning new statewide voter registration databases are keeping eligible voters off of the rolls, through no fault of their own.”

Matching an applicant’s registration number with information in a database is an error prone and unreliable process. Both human and computer errors are endemic in the inputting, maintaining, transferring, storing, and matching of data.

For example, a study by Abt Associates determined that in a Florida social services database, as many as 26 percent of the records included city names spelled incorrectly, including forty different spellings of Fort Lauderdale. Moreover, Florida’s matching procedures not only disenfranchise numerous eligible voters but they disproportionately impact certain racial and ethnic groups.

“These sources of error will confront election officials with tens of thousands of bureaucracy-generated mistakes preventing eligible citizens from voting,” continued Maranzano. “Even under the best case scenario, disenfranchisement will be widespread. The only question is how many voters will be denied.”

HAVA requires every state to obtain a unique identifying number for voter registration applicants, but it does not make the “verification” of one’s ID number a pre-requisite for one’s eligibility to vote. As such, Florida should not go beyond its existing methods for determining eligibility, which include requiring that all voters present an ID at the polls.

Advancement Project is asking the state at a minimum to:

• Allow voters whose identification number has not been verified to verify their numbers at the polls by presenting identification to the poll worker. The voter would then vote a provisional ballot that would be counted because the identification number had been verified. Add these voters to the registration rolls because verification of the identifying number was the only factor preventing registration.
• Send a notice to all voters who are on “hold” because of the state’s inability to verify their identification number explaining their right to present identification at the polls.
• Post on the internet a list of all the individuals who are on “hold” status, including their names, address, phone numbers (where this information is available), and the reason they have been placed in this category. Given that this information is public record, there should not be privacy concerns with making this information widely available.

“Florida is relying on computers to accurately identify eligible voters in a way that exceeds the limits of human error in entering data,” concluded Maranzano. “A ‘no match, no vote’ rule will mistakenly reject too many registration applications, too close to the election. If Florida continues down the current path of requiring an ID match as a precondition to registration, a close examination of the intersection between Florida’s current approach and federal laws will be in order.”

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Advancement Project’s core purpose is to develop, encourage, pioneer and widely disseminate innovative ideas and models that inspire and mobilize a broad national racial justice movement so that universal opportunity and a just democracy are achieved.
The organization was founded on the principle that structural racism can be eliminated and a racially just democracy may be attained through multi-racial collective action by organized communities. Advancement Project’s founding team of veteran civil rights lawyers and communications experts have established an organization that informs community organizing with careful legal analysis and strategic communications campaigns. We develop community-based solutions based on the same high quality legal analysis and public education campaigns that produced the landmark civil rights victories of earlier eras.

Screwing Minority Voters in Florida 2006 – Katherine Harris Style

FLORIDA’S LATEST VOTER SUPPRESSION SCHEME“NO MATCH. NO VOTE”

“NO MATCH. NO VOTE”

FLORIDA’S LATEST VOTER SUPPRESSION SCHEME
“NO MATCH. NO VOTE”