Florida Republicans Scramble to Suppress the Vote

It’s no secret that Democrats are posting a big voter registration surge in Florida. According to estimates from the Florida Democratic Party, Dems have added 287,770 new voters this year to the GOP’s 112,290 (and 90,000 independents). While Republicans have been publicly brushing off suggestions that this trend is at all worrisome to their party, their actions suggest otherwise. So here’s the latest ploy from Florida’s GOP to tip the scales back in their favor:

The Florida Department of State, backed by Gov. Charlie Crist, is rushing to implement a new law that could block thousands of those voters’ ballots. And turn Election Day 2008 in Florida into a catastrophe akin to the hanging-chads debacle of 2000, if legions of disenfranchised voters step up with lawsuits.

Here’s what’s happening:

With six weeks before the Nov. 4 elections, Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning last week began enforcing what’s known as the “No Match, No Vote” law.

Passed by the GOP-dominated Legislature as an anti-fraud measure, No Match, No Vote bars citizens from voting if their driver’s license or Social Security number don’t match information from government databases.

Stopping voter fraud is a fine idea, but the databases are error prone.

Simple glitches such as clerical typos toss out voters’ applications, and unusual spellings of names of new voters could cause “no match” results.

With no time for troubleshooting the system, that could falsely disenfranchise many who’ve done nothing wrong.

Florida’s elections officials are already swamped with the processing of the many thousands of new voter registrations being turned in. They may not have time to contact new applicants and get any discrepancies sorted out.

Consider this just another friendly reminder that Republicans will do everything in their power to game the system in their favor.