Guest Blogger: Florida Law May Disenfranchise Thousands of Voters
by Jennifer Maranzano, staff attorney with Advancement Project
On September 17, 2007, the Florida branch of the NAACP, the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project filed a lawsuit challenging a Florida statute that could disenfranchise tens of thousands of eligible citizens. The law bars any Florida citizen from registering to vote if the state cannot match or otherwise validate the driver’s license or Social Security number on a registration form.
Plaintiffs argue that this “matching” process unduly delayed or denied registrations for thousands of Florida voters in 2006, and will jeopardize many more voters in 2008. A federal judge in Washington State struck down a similar law in 2006. Several other states, including California, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas, have scrapped their "no match, no vote" policies. Florida is one of the outlier states that continue to require this error-laden “matching” process prior to registration.
Plaintiffs and advocates are especially concerned about this law’s impact on communities of color. For example, Florida’s law would affect Latino voters who use maternal and paternal surnames and Haitian Americans whose first two names are hyphenated, both of which may be entered differently in different databases. Additionally, the law could particularly impact the African-American community in which it is more common to have unique names and spellings.
Additionally, nicknames and married names can cause mismatches. 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 will also preclude citizens from voting. A mistyped name or number could trigger a mismatch.
Advancement Project, in coalition with other Florida groups, has been advocating for a change in this law over the last year. In 2006, we and our coalition partners sent a letter to the Secretary of State’s office outlining how the Florida statute violated federal law and suggesting steps the state could take, within the boundaries of the law, to decrease the likelihood of individuals being disenfranchised in 2006. Thus far, the state has not changed its practice.
The full text of the complaint is available here.
Counsel for the case include Advancement Project, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, Project Vote; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP; and Greenberg Traurig LLP.