Florida in 2008: Still Hot. Still Humid. Still Disenfranchsing voters.
Florida, oh, Florida. What are we going to do with you? We’re all afraid that the November 2008 election will be, in the words of baseball great Yogi Berra, “deja vu all over again.” But you, my stately friend, you’re trying to make sure of it, aren’t you?
Seriously, what is it with you and your judges? Is it something in the water? Or do you have some sort of complex that compels you to prevent your citizens from exercising their most basic right? C’mon, you can tell us. Unhappy childhood? Demanding father? Franchisophobia (an irrational fear of elections)?
How else would you explain last week’s District Court ruling that said that you are within your right “to reject voter applications if they didn’t match an applicant’s Florida driver’s license or the last four digits of their social security number?”
You do realize the effect this will have on your citizens, right? Thousands will show up at the polls on election day, expecting to be on the rolls, and will instead be turned away because of what could be a clerical or bureaucratic error? Or because they left out their middle initial on their registration form?
I see you have your Republican Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, snowed. He thinks there’s good reason for this kind of law. He thinks it will “prevent fraud and errors in the system.” You might want to tell him that the kind of voter fraud he thinks it might prevent is virtually non-existent. Seriously. Doesn’t exist. Even the U.S. Supreme Court of the United States said so.
I’m telling you, FL, you’re killing us here.