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League Stops Registering Voters, Plans To Sue Florida
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Published: April 28, 2008
MIAMI - The League of Women Voters and its 27 local leagues have helped thousands of Floridians register to vote over the years.
Just more than a week ago, however, the organization's leaders said they would have to stop their current drive because the state's top election official planned to enforce strict deadlines for the return of voter registration forms, with escalating fines of up to $1,000 for late or lost forms.
"We're an all-volunteer organization," said Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, president of the League of Women Voters in Florida, which plans to sue. "It's a matter of being able to protect the leagues from liability."
Eight years after the debacle of "hanging chads," Florida once again seems to be courting electoral trouble. The 2000 recount spawned drastic changes across the country, with new policies or laws intended to create a less dysfunctional voting system.
Yet in Florida, Election Day may end up looking oddly familiar, according to independent election experts at Pew's Electionline.org and other organizations.
The Florida law tries to manage voter registration drives conducted by third parties by imposing stiff fines for registration forms that arrive late or contain errors. Also, would-be voters can be knocked off the rolls for typographical errors on their registration forms.
A third and more widely criticized provision keeps a voter from correcting mistakes or omissions on a registration form in the final month before an election and would bar that person from voting. The oversight can be as simple as failing to check three required boxes.
One of the checkoffs - known by many Florida residents as the "crazy box" - is often overlooked because of its odd syntax, asking people to affirm: "I have not been adjudicated mentally incapacitated with respect to voting or, if I have, my competency has been restored."
So far, about 3 percent of all voter registrations collected by the Florida chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a national organizing group, have been missing the required checkmarks.
Federal Law Muddied Rules
State officials say the new provisions bring order to a chaotic system. But critics argue that Florida's revised election laws make it harder to vote here than in nearly any other state, and they predict that tens of thousands of potential Florida voters will be kept off the rolls - many of them poor, black or Hispanic.
"Its really about politicians trying to game the system," said Michael Slater, deputy director of Project Vote, a voting rights organization based in Arkansas. "They've done that by adding all these bureaucratic obstacles to voting, and then when people can't jump over them, they blame the voter."
In many ways, the dispute reflects the larger national debate over overhauling the voting system.
In the fallout after the 2000 election, Congress tried to institute a uniform guide for voter registration when it passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Among other things, the legislation mandated that states create computerized voter registration rolls; it was not clear on how to handle errors that turned up on registration forms or at the polls on Election Day.
Many states decided that disputes would be worked out case by case. But more ambitious states responded with new rules, practices or laws. By 2006, at least 11 states had provisions that rejected potential voters with Social Security numbers or driver's license numbers that did not match state databases.
Florida and a handful of other states - including Colorado, Georgia, New Mexico and Ohio - also passed laws to more tightly control the efforts of voter registration groups.
Colorado and New Mexico even required that forms be returned within 48 hours, a far shorter window than the 10-day limit that Florida officials plan to enforce.
Besides Florida, however, only New Mexico assesses fines. And according to Doug Chapin, director of Pew's Electionline.org, Florida is more restrictive than most states in other ways as well.
In 2006, for example, a judge in Washington state struck down a "no match, no vote" law similar to the one here, and courts in at least six other states have issued similar rulings.
Courts Push Back Challenges
Two recent federal rulings added to the dispute over the Florida election laws.
On March 25, a U.S. District Court in Miami rejected a challenge to the provision that keeps voters from correcting mistakes or omissions after the state's registration deadline, which is 29 days before an election.
In the second decision, on April 3, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit sent a case challenging the law requiring database matches back to a U.S. District Court, reversing an earlier injunction without ruling whether the law was unconstitutional.
Wheatley-Giliotti of the League of Women Voters said her group's 3,000 members were saddened by having to give up the registration effort. The 69-year-old organization first stopped helping voters register in 2006, before a federal judge enjoined the original law that August.
Now, she said, the group must stop once again because some local leagues have a budget of only $1,000 and the fines could wipe them out.
Secretary of State Kurt Browning's office, which said it had not started assessing penalties, has acknowledged that the law is vague on whether the cap of $1,000 would apply to an entire organization, a chapter or individual volunteers.
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