By The News Service of Florida
A non-profit advocacy group on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s process of verifying voter-registration applications, alleging it violates federal laws.
The lawsuit, filed in the federal Middle District of Florida, focuses on the process for verifying voter-registration applicants’ eligibility. Prospective voters are deemed eligible by election officials if certain identifying information entered into the state’s voter-registration system lines up with data maintained by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles or the federal Social Security Administration.
Applicants whose information does not produce an “exact match” are not allowed to vote “unless they overcome burdensome bureaucratic hurdles,” the lawsuit said. The process “not only places the burden of verification on Black voters, it further disenfranchises Black eligible voters,” lawyers representing Florida Rising Together, the plaintiff, wrote in the lawsuit.
The group is a nonprofit “dedicated to advancing economic and racial justice across Florida by building power in historically marginalized communities,” according to the lawsuit. The state’s process is flawed, in part, because the federal database used to verify voter registration “is widely known to routinely produce false and inconsistent results,” the lawsuit alleged.
The lawsuit also said “more than 43,000 individuals who submitted otherwise valid voter registration applications to Florida election officials since 2018 across 26 Florida counties have never been able to register to vote successfully solely due to the ‘exact match’ requirement.”
The state’s process “is compounded by a legacy of historic and deliberate disenfranchisement and interacts with the effects of racial and economic discrimination in access to the ballot that continue to plague Florida,” the lawsuit said.
“Taken together, the ‘exact match’ protocol denies Black and other voters of color an equal opportunity to register to vote and participate in Florida’s political process and is a leading reason why voter registration applicants do not successfully make it onto Florida’s voter rolls.”
Florida Rising is represented by a coalition including Advancement Project, Community Justice Project, the Dechert LLP firm, and Florida A&M University Law School professor Mark Dorosin.
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@Mr. Hawkins
You just won the award for the longest run-on sentence ever published by Tallahassee Reports. Congratulations! Half way through it I lost track of what you were trying to say.
“Applicants whose information does not produce an “exact match” are not allowed to vote “unless they overcome burdensome bureaucratic hurdles,””
Hurdles that are there for good reason, if you want to vote, overcome them, you have had time to do so, quit being lazy.
Why doesn’t the “Florida Rising Together” Group, the “Advancement Project” and the “Community Justice Project” get with many of the ones that have “never been able to register to vote successfully solely due to the ‘exact match’ requirement” and figure out why that is, start by standing beside them trough the whole process from start to finish, helping them fill out the Forms and everything else so YOU can see what the problems are and that you you can explain it to all the right people including the Governor to work on any needed changes as well as working with the People and help them if they need to make any changes on their part. I am sure there are more than just me that would like to know the results.