[lbo-talk] registering in Florida

JBrown72073 at cs.com JBrown72073 at cs.com
Thu Oct 21 13:08:41 PDT 2004



>How much of this is going on?
>
>Doug

Plenty. In our county, people had their absentee votes thrown out in the primary because their signatures (from back when they registered to vote, oh, 30 years before) didn't match the signature on their ballot. Then there's a group that was running around registering students as Republicans only, or changing their registrations without telling them (they thought they were signing a petition about sex offender sentencing, or medical marijuana.) Our supervisor of elections--who shows flashes of conscientiousness--checked with 30 of the 500 or so change of registrations she received in a clump and found that none of them had intended to change their registration to Republican. This is a statewide phenomenon on campuses, and may explain why Florida is the only state where Republican and Democratic new registrations are appearing in equal numbers. Then of course there's the Secretary of State Glenda Hood (and most elections supervisors) rejecting registrations when all that's missing is the box saying "I am a U.S. citizen." At the bottom of the form, you sign a statement saying the same thing. Not good enough. In Duval County (Jacksonville) people who had information missing from their registration forms were not told until (oops!) after the deadline had passed. These last two are the subject of a suit. Then there's the Florida Department of Law Enforcement 'visiting' elderly black voting activists in Orlando, and the attempt by Bush and Hood to foist on local elections officials a fake felon purge list (recently an email was released to the press which showed that Jeb Bush knew in advance it was riddled with what the press charitably called 'errors.' The scam only failed because AP and others sued to have the list made public, and the court agreed.

I'm on a Fla. elections reform list--all activists who've been working on this since at least 2002--and someone described themselves sitting at home, staring at their absentee ballot, trying to figure out whether to submit that, do early voting, or what, to increase the chances their vote would count. A range of opinions was expressed, which, taken together spelled out "W E A R E F U C K E D."

But the most significant story, I think, is the touchscreen machines with no paper ballot, and "proprietary" software, which half of Florida's voters will be using. Get ready for a bunch of complaints that election have become too litigious, and zero complaints that the Florida election officials have yet to be thrown in jail for obvious, repeated violations of the Voting Rights Act.

Jenny Brown



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list