Florida to enforce 'no-match, no-vote' law for Nov. election

Florida has apparently ended felony disenfranchisement (de jure, of course), but how about tossing out your vote because of a misspelling in the state's voter database? Sounds frivolous and unconstitutional, but Flordia will likely get its way (compare with the US Supreme Court's decision earlier this year re: Indiana's voter-I.D. requirements, William Crawford et al. v. Marion County Election Board, et al.
). State officials are ready to pick off thousands of people of color from the voting lines in November... you know, because our names are so gosh-darn hard to spell!

Florida Voting Law May Disenfranchise Thousands | AlterNet

Voting rights advocates are alarmed over the Florida Secretary of State's September 8th decision to enforce the state's "no-match, no-vote" law, a voter registration law that previously blocked more than 16,000 eligible Florida citizens from registering to vote, through no fault of their own, and could disenfranchise tens of thousands more voters in November.

Secretary of State Kurt Browning's last-minute decision to implement the law in the final month before the registration deadline will post a significant hurdle to eligible Florida citizens hoping to vote in November. It will disenfranchise voters who do not send or bring a photocopy of their driver's license to county election officials' offices after voting, even though these voters will have shown their driver's licenses when they went to vote at the polls.

"This 11th-hour decision is an ill-advised move to apply a policy the state has never enforced in its current form, at a time when registration activity is at its highest," stated Beverlye Neal, director of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, a plaintiff in a lawsuit that challenges Florida's matching law. "The Secretary's decision will put thousands of real Florida citizens at risk due to bureaucratic typos that under the 'no-match, no-vote' law will prevent them from voting this November," said Alvaro Fernandez of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, another plaintiff in the case.