By any other name…

by Marcia Johnson-Blanco

A federal court in Florida has refused to stop the disenfranchisement of more than 16,000 of the state’s residents because of how they spell their name. A press release by an Election Protection coalition partner, the Brennan Center for Justice, discusses the upholding of the "no-match, no-vote law" by a federal trial court.

The overly stringent law has been previously challenged in federal court and requires that the name written on a voter registration form must be identical to that found on record from their driver’s license or social security number. The mistype of a single letter by an election worker is all it takes to disenfranchise a voter. As if that weren’t enough, a voter cannot even produce an alternate form of ID to prove his or her identity.
 
The press release from the Brennan Center calls attention to key flaws: 

The process starts with an attempt to "match" voter information to other government databases, a practice for which the Social Security Administration reports a 46% failure rate. State officials in the case, Florida NAACP vs. Browning, admitted that typographical errors by election workers are responsible for most of the failures.

The release also stated that

In December 2007, the Gainesville federal court granted a preliminary injunction against the no-match, no-vote law under two federal statutes, ruling that Florida’s law "makes it harder to vote by imposing a matching requirement that is a barrier to voter registration."

Click here to read the Brennan Center’s press release.