Fla Judge Reverses Rethug Anti-Voter Registration Law

Rethugs say they will appeal.

Surprise, surprise.

BLOGGED BY Brad Friedman ON 12/18/2007 3:33PM

Judge Reverses Florida's Anti-Voter Registration Law!

A Notable Victory for Democracy Advocates Among Continuing Anti-Democracy Efforts by Republicans and the DoJ Around the Country

Court Decision May Ease Concerns Shared with BRAD BLOG by a Noted Sunshine State Election Official…

More good news out of Florida, where a judge has tossed out an outrageous anti-voter law which, critics charge, could well have disenfranchised thousands of Sunshine State voters (again) just in time for the 2008 Presidential Election. We spoke just last week with Ion Sancho, Leon County (Tallahassee)'s legendary Supervisor of Elections, who expressed grave concerns about this very law, even as Republican's promise to appeal the judge's decision, and continue other anti-voter related efforts about the country.

According to the Miami Herald's breaking coverage this morning...

TALLAHASSEE --- A federal judge ordered state election officials to stop enforcing a 2-year-old voter registration law, ruling Tuesday that there is already proof that the change put in place by the GOP-controlled Florida Legislature has resulted in ``actual harm to real individuals.''

About 14,000 people have not been able to register because of Florida's ''no match'' law that requires a citizen's name on a voter registration form be matched with a Social Security number or driver's license number. The law has been challenged by the NAACP and other groups that say the law unfairly blocks blacks and Hispanics from being able to register to vote.
...
U.S. District Judge Stephan Mickle rejected arguments from the state that the law is needed to deter possible voter fraud, pointing out that the state has not been able to prove that the 14,000 voters now in limbo engaged in voter fraud. He said the requirements put in place by Florida lawmakers apper to conflict with federal voting rights laws.

''The disenfranchisement, however unintentional, causes damage to the election system that cannot be repaired after the election has passed,'' Mickle wrote in the order.

The article goes on to report that FLA's appointed Republican Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, says the state will appeal the ruling, about which he says, "in my view the Legislature appropriately enacted this important anti-fraud provision as part of Florida's Election Code."

Browning's comments, unfortunately, come as little surprise for a number of disturbing reasons...

In an arguably related point, Browning, the former Pasco County, FL Supervisor of Elections, was one of the state's most ardent supporters of unverifiable, inaccurate, easily manipulated touch-screen voting machines, until forced by his new boss, Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, to support Crist's largely successful campaign to rid the state, once and for all, of such unreliable touch-screen voting systems.

For his part, Tallahassee's Sancho (one of the good guys, as seen in HBO's seminal documentary Hacking Democracy) told us last week that he was gravely concerned about the law which would have given anybody the right to challenge a voter's legitimacy, without recourse for the voter.

"We're gonna have problems in Florida. We're gonna have major problems next year" in regard to the law which was reversed today, and which Sancho told The BRAD BLOG he sees as part of a "continuing conspiracy to suppress 3% of the vote across the entire country" in next year's election.

Florida's law is one of several recently enacted by Republicans around the country making it harder to register legal voters to vote, and for registered voters to be able to cast their legal vote without obstacle on Election Day.

The Republican legislature in Ohio recently enacted a similar law to Florida's, while the DoJ's now-thankfully-former voting section chief, John Tanner, had recently upped the ante by sending notices to 10 different key states, threatening them with lawsuits if they did not carry out draconian and immediate purges of their voter registration databases.

More recently, the DoJ filed an amicus brief in the upcoming Supreme Court battle over draconian Photo ID restrictions at the polling place, meant largely --- in the absence of any notable evidence of voter fraud --- to keep Democratic-leaning voters from being able to cast a vote at all. Needless to say, by now, the Bush Administration's DoJ came out in favor of the Indiana law which will be coming before the high court in January.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Back To The Future....

Voting machines give Florida a new headache

By Abby Goodnough

Saturday, October 13, 2007

MIAMI: It used to be that everyone wanted a Florida voting machine.

After the history-making presidential recount of 2000, Palm Beach County sold hundreds of its infamous Votomatic machines to memorabilia seekers, including a group of chiropractors in Arizona, the cable-news host Greta Van Susteren and the hotelier André Balazs. One machine ended up in the Smithsonian Institution. Dozens were transformed into pieces of contemporary art for an exhibition in New York.

But now that Florida is purging its precincts of 25,000 touch-screen voting machines - bought after the recount for up to $5,000 each, hailed as the way of the future but deemed failures after five or six years - no one is biting.

"I think we are going to have them on hand for a while," said Arthur Anderson, the elections supervisor in Palm Beach County, which must jettison 4,900 touch-screen machines for which it paid $14.5 million in 2001 and still owes $4.8 million. "They are probably, for the most part, headed to the scrap pile."

Across the United States, jurisdictions that experimented with touch-screen voting after 2000 are starting to scale back or abandon it based on a growing perception that the machines are unreliable and concern that they do not provide a paper trail in case questions arise. California will sharply scale back touch-screen voting next year after a review by the secretary of state found it was vulnerable to hackers.

Florida is the biggest state to reject touch screens so sweepingly, and its deadline for removing them, July 1, 2008, is the most imminent. For the 15 counties that must dump their expensive systems, buy new optical-scan machines and retrain thousands of poll workers, hurdles abound.

Six counties still owe a combined $33 million on their touch-screen machines, which most bought hurriedly to comply with a new federal law banning punch-card and lever voting systems after the recount. Miami-Dade County alone must cast aside 7,200 touch-screen machines, for which it paid $24.5 million and still owes $15 million.

Secretary of State Kurt Browning is seeking buyers for the touch screens, but he will not even begin to recoup the counties' losses. Inquiries have come from a Veterans Affairs hospital in Miami, which hoped to convert some of the machines into "learning kiosks" for disabled patients, and the Century Village retirement community in Palm Beach County, which wanted them for condo association elections.

Sequoia Voting Systems, which manufactured some of Florida's machines, offered to buy them back for a bleak $1 apiece.

"We're not accepting that offer," said Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for the Florida Division of Elections. "We can get more for our money."

So far, Ivey said, the most likely options are selling the machines to recycling companies that would strip them for parts - from the wheels on the voting booths to the circuit boards - or reselling them to other states or countries through one of the original vendors, Election Systems and Software of Omaha.

"We would expect a number of jurisdictions to be interested in adding to their existing voting terminals as they prepare for the 2008 general election," said Ken Fields, a spokesman for the company.

Most of the money for the touch screens came from the federal government, and so will most for the replacement machines, which cost about $6,000 each. But with Florida county budgets tightening due to a state mandate to cut property taxes, election officials are griping.

"I think it's a real waste of money," said Kay Clem, the elections supervisor in Indian River County. "I don't have my heart in it, because I think we're going 30 years backwards."

Under the state's new election law, disabled voters can keep voting by touch screen - akin to using an A.T.M. - until 2012. But everyone else will use them only twice more, for the presidential primaries on Jan. 29 and municipal elections next spring. With optical scanning, voters use pens to mark paper ballots that are then read by scanning machines, leaving a paper record for recounts.

The only county that has already switched is Sarasota, where voters last year approved a charter amendment requiring a paper-ballot system. More than 18,000 votes cast on touch-screen machines were not recorded in a close Congressional race in the county last year, raising an outcry that hastened the statewide switch to optical scanning.

Sarasota County's touch-screen machines are sequestered under court order while an investigation into last year's election continues. Most of the other counties getting new equipment will ask the state to cart their touch screens away after the presidential primaries.

"I will get them off my hands, one way or the other," Browning said.

Like many other county election officials, he said he still believed in touch-screen voting, calling it "a very accurate, secure, reliable system." He supports the switch to optical scanners, Browning said, only because the public no longer trusts touch screens.

"If you were to do a very thorough study of problems with touch screens," he said, "you would probably find that 99.9 percent of them would be traced back to human error."

Public interest groups almost universally supported the move to optical scanning, which is now thought more reliable than touch-screen voting, if only because it leaves a paper trail.

One problem that could persist is poor ballot design, which was responsible for widespread voter confusion in Palm Beach County in 2000 and possibly for the not-recorded votes in Sarasota County last year. Browning said the state would revise its ballot design rule in time for the presidential election in 2008.

As for the displeasure of election supervisors, Browning said it was understandable given that for many this would be the third voting system in eight years.

"After a while, you get a little change-weary," he said. "Nothing seems to be stable or constant anymore. But I am very, very hopeful that this is the last major change to voting systems in Florida for some time."

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Vote Caging In Duval County in Florida, 2004

Files show talks on 'vote caging'

Discussions with elections chief were prior to '04 election

By J. Taylor Rushing, Capital Bureau Chief

TALLAHASSEE - Internal city memos show the issue of Republican "vote caging" efforts in Jacksonville's African-American neighborhoods was discussed in the weeks before the 2004 election, contradicting recent claims by former Duval County Republican leader Mike Hightower - the Bush-Cheney campaign's local chairman at the time.

The contradiction comes to light as the U.S. Justice Department continues to consider a June 18 request from two U.S. senators for an investigation into potential illegal voter suppression tactics in Duval County three years ago. A department spokeswoman said last week that the request is still being reviewed.

Hightower, in a Times-Union interview last month, said the controversial voter suppression tactic of "caging" was never raised in daily meetings hosted by former Duval County Supervisor of Elections Bill Scheu, and he had never heard "of that expression or that practice." Hightower said last week he stands by those recollections.

City officials have disputed that, saying Scheu's daily pre-election meetings with local Republicans, Democrats and African-American community leaders repeatedly included the topic. The city also released attendance records showing Hightower was present.

"This issue was raised during the 2004 election; the supervisor of elections and his counsel were aware of the allegations, discussed them at times during daily meetings with both political parties, and did not have any instances of challenges based on caging," Cindy Laquidara, chief deputy general counsel for Jacksonville, said in a June 20 e-mail to Duval County elections officials. The elections office was responding to a Times-Union public record request; the e-mail was obtained through a similar request.

Scheu told the Times-Union last week the caging issue "probably" came up during repeated discussions over vote challenges.

Hightower, however, stuck by his denial.

"I've never heard the phrase or the practice. I don't care what anybody says," he said. "That's their opinion. Mike Hightower doesn't remember that. Call it a senior moment."

"Vote caging" has a long history in politics. In one such procedure, a campaign will send out postcards to a particular group of addresses with instructions to return the mail. The campaign then creates a database of addresses that did not return the postcards and challenges the right of anyone registered at those addresses who attempts to vote on Election Day. The effect often dissuades turnout. The tactic is legal, but not if voters are targeted by race.

The 3-year-old allegation of caging in Jacksonville gained new life last month, when the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee received testimony indicating the GOP may have used the tactic in 2004.

Ann Farra, a former chairwoman of voter registration and education for the Duval County Democratic Party, said the fact no challenges occurred in 2004 is irrelevant, and Hightower was aware of the Bush-Cheney campaign tactics.

"This is like Bill Clinton saying he didn't have sex with Monica Lewinsky," Farra said. "Word had gotten out into the communities and caused people to stay away from the polls. Suppression was going on left and right."

jt.rushing@jacksonville.com,



(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.