BlogWood: MT Archives

Registration roundup

Preelection legal challenges abound

Civil rights groups, organized labor and Democrats intensified pressure Tuesday on Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood to further open elections, now just 27 days away.

The American Civil Liberties Union threatened to take Hood to court over her directive to elections supervisors regarding incomplete voter registration applications. A coalition including the ACLU demanded action regarding manual recounts for touch-screen voting systems. And the Florida Supreme Court scheduled oral arguments in a challenge from labor unions over provisional ballots.

More news here and here and here.

Now, that last one’s interesting, because it deals with some very fishy looking registration forms.

A spot-check of voters who were registered using photocopied forms indicates that they really did sign up to vote, Leon County's elections chief said Tuesday, but doubts continue about their choice of party.

Leon County received about 1,500 photocopied voter registrations, mostly from Florida A&M University and nearby black neighborhoods. The overwhelming majority registered as Republicans, which made Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho suspicious because the FAMU precincts are lopsidedly Democratic.

His staff has contacted 36 voters so far, all of whom said they signed color registration forms, not the black-and-gray photocopies forwarded to Sancho. And only one of the 36 said he intended to sign up with the GOP.

Voters aren't required to designate a party when they register, and members of all parties can vote in the Nov. 2 general election. So for voting purposes, party registration won't matter until the 2006 primaries and people have plenty of time to switch.

But there's still the question of whether the signatures on the forms are originals as the law requires. Sancho revealed Monday that he asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate.

It's possible that an organization running low on registration forms made copies and that the forms were filled out and signed with a black felt-tip pen, which can be difficult to distinguish from a photocopy.

The FDLE will help verify voter-registration documents from counties where elections officials suspect fraud or forgery, a spokesman said, but agents are leaving it to election supervisors to interview voters.

"The Department of Law Enforcement is not trying to engage in a broad-brush policing of elections," said Tom Berlinger, an aide to FDLE Commissioner Guy Tunnell. "What we're trying to do is to assist the Department of State and supervisors of elections if they are having difficulty establishing whether a registration document is valid."

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating accusations that FDLE agents intimidated black voters in Orlando by going to their homes to interview them about alleged voter fraud.

Does anyone else smell a coming campaign to stifle voter registration (or perhaps a looming court challenge to disenfranchise many newly registered voters)? I mean, it seems to me that a group which despises free and open elections might be motivated to flood elections offices with bogus registration forms so that they could point back to the urgent problem of “fraudulent” applications supposedly submitted by money grubbing “outsiders” who wish to taint the integrity of the electoral process.

More here.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating 1,500 voter registration forms received by the Leon County elections office that apparently were altered to register local students as Republicans.

County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho said it was suspicious enough that the registration forms were all photocopies, but the new voters were also between the ages of 18 and 24, a group that often registers with no party affiliation.

''When we saw that all of these individuals were registered as Republicans, a buzzer went off,'' Sancho said.

Most were students at Florida A&M University, Florida State University or Tallahassee Community College. The office began calling the applicants, contacting a couple of dozen before deciding to turn the forms over to the FDLE.

''Once it became clear that their information did not jibe with the information on the application forms, that's when we decided to act,'' Sancho said. ``The overwhelming majority of them had not selected the Republican Party as the party they wanted to be registered in.''

The Leon County case is one of several being looked at around the state. In some cases, there are reports of bogus addresses, forms coming in with false information and registered voters who are being reregistered without their knowledge.

In Leon, the alleged fraud could have meant the 1,500 applicants wouldn't be allowed to vote. Sancho, however, said he is placing the people on the voting rolls with no party affiliation.

Both major political parties criticized the alleged fraud.

''It's absolutely despicable, but not surprising,'' said Florida Democratic Party Chairman Scott Maddox. ``After the year 2000, we should do whatever we can to make sure we have a fair electoral process.''

Republican Party spokeswoman Mindy Tucker Fletcher placed the blame for some of this year's registration problems on the many independent groups signing up new voters.

''It's unfortunate when you have all these groups from outside the state coming in here and trying to take over the elections process and they are motivated not by what's best for Florida but by making money for themselves,'' the spokeswoman said.