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Counting On Browning's Steady Hand

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By TOM JACKSON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 28, 2008

The countdown to Decision 2008 has reached its attention-focusing phase, which can mean only one thing: The usual opportunists are back, predicting another Florida Election Day meltdown.

You can't swing a broomstick without whacking - deservedly so - one of the flying monkeys who've taken wing on an updraft of suspicion that, even now, nefarious operatives of a certain political party are actively plotting to keep certain decent, honest and patriotic citizens from exercising their voting franchise.

Through stealth, legislation, litigation, subterfuge and strategic incompetence, they say, Sunshine State Republicans are girding for more election thievery. Already, paranoia levels are soaring, all because of a court-vetted voter verification process breathless worrywarts decry, mistakenly, as "no match, no vote."

In an Air America interview enshrined on lefty Web sites, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blames HAVA - the federal Help America Vote Act, a response to Florida's substantially mythologized role in the 2000 presidential election - for "institutionalizing all of the problems that happened" here, particularly the election-year purging of about 96,000 names from statewide voter rolls.

Alarms clang as activists note surging voter registrations that will likely continue until Oct. 6's book-closing. Suppose they don't all get processed and verified. ACORN's Florida organizer told the Tribune he worries that official dawdling could "knock people out of the process so late in the game that they effectively have no recourse."

Browning To The Rescue

An e-mail from the Washington-based Advancement Project carried the subject line "Florida Moves Forward With Plans to Disenfranchise Voters." How? By enforcing verification standards set by the Legislature, then amended to comport with recommendations in an adverse federal appeals court ruling. At this, activists' attorney Alvaro Fernandez laments the "thousands of real Florida citizens" who will have their voting rights put at risk.

Believing this requires elaborately misinterpreting the statute's provisions as well as dismissing well-publicized efforts by the Division of Elections to make them work with unassailable fairness. This last is no less than what would be expected by Pasco residents who trusted Kurt Browning, the eye in this election hurricane and, yes, a Republican, to run clean, efficient and honest voting for 26 years.

"Some people just don't want to listen," says Browning, plucked from Pasco by Gov. Charlie Crist to serve as secretary of state. Efforts to make sure that voters are who they say they are amount to no more than preserving the integrity of elections, he says, not an attempt to "weed out Latinos, African-Americans or lower socio-economic realms," as claimed, but not proven, in an NAACP lawsuit.

Playing A Provisional

Verifications continue apace in Tallahassee, with problem applications getting reviewed against scanned versions of the originals to resolve common snags - a given name on an official document, a nickname on an application, for instance.

Ultimately, Florida law allows would-be voters who discover on Election Day that they're not among the official registrants to cast a provisional ballot, which can be certified by providing identification within two days. It's a failsafe backstop hysterical critics conveniently overlook.

No match, no vote? Nonsense.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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