September 21, 2007

ADVANCEMENT PROJECT CHALLENGES FLORIDA REGISTRATION LAW IN FEDERAL COURT

On September 17, 2007 Advancement Project, and other voting rights activists, filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of Florida challenging a Florida statute that could disenfranchise tens of thousands of eligible citizens from registering and voting in the 2008 elections.

The law bars any Florida citizen from registering to vote if the state cannot match or otherwise validate the driver’s license or Social Security number on a registration form, an error-laden practice struck down in 2006 by a federal judge in Washington State. Plaintiffs bringing this suit, including the Florida branch of the NAACP and the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, contend that this matching law unduly delayed or denied registrations for thousands of Florida voters in 2006, and will jeopardize many more voters in 2008 if not blocked.

Plaintiffs argue that there are several ways the bureaucratic process will disenfranchise tens of thousands of eligible voters in the 2008 election cycle, especially in trying to match registration forms with Social Security information.

Plaintiffs and advocates are especially concerned about this law’s impact on communities of color.  For example, Florida’s law would affect Latino voters who use maternal and paternal surnames and Haitian Americans whose first two names are hyphenated, both of which may be entered differently in different databases.  Additionally, the law could particularly impact the African-American community in which it is more common to have unique names and spellings. 

Advancement Project, in coalition with other Florida groups, has been advocating for a change in this law over the last year.  After identifying this issue as a potential barrier to voting in 2006, Advancement Project and the coalition sent a letter to the Secretary of State’s office outlining how the Florida statute violated federal law and suggesting steps the state could take, within the boundaries of the law, to decrease the likelihood of individuals being disenfranchised in 2006.  In response to this letter and other advocacy efforts, Florida refused to change its unlawful practice of requiring a match before adding an applicant to the registration rolls.

For more information on Florida State Conference of the NAACP, et al. v. Kurt S. Browning,  go to: www.advancementproject.com.   

Counsel for the case include Advancement Project, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, Project Vote; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP; and Greenberg Traurig LLP.