Eight years after the 2000 election debacle, Florida voters have another chance to make history. By one count, as few as 193 Florida votes decided the 2000 election according to CNN!

Obama can win Florida with our help - Let's take back the vote!

Latest polls, Get out the Vote

Latest Polls in Florida - show shifts toward McCain. CNN/Time/Opinion Research Corp. (1 pt.) and Quinnipiac (3 pt.). Obama leads by about 2 pts.

Get out the vote. Choose a battleground state to call. The call list includes the voter's polling location.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

3 days to go - Making Every Vote Count

The LA Times reports that "voting rights watchdogs are sounding the alarm that a repeat of the Florida fiasco of 2000 could occur in any of a dozen battleground states."

The article cites the purging of 30,000 new registrations from Colorado's voter registry and 10,000 from Florida's, along with irregularities in other states.

The Times quoted Rick Haseen, a professor of election law at Loyola Law School, "I think we're going to see alot of problems, in part because some voters aren't going to find out until election day that they've been dropped from the rolls. I expect this to happen in Florida, where they had a very aggressive, no match, no vote policy."

The Miami Herald explained the "no match" policy - "The ID check spits out voter registrations that don't match driver's license or social security records. It has left voters on a list dominated by blacks, Hispanics and Democrats in a legal limbo -- unless they supply elections officials with additional proof they are who they say they are."

Under Florida state law, voters whose registrations have been questioned can be forced to cast a "provisional" ballot on Nov. 4th, that will only be counted if the voter can provide proper identification by 5 p.m. on Nov. 6.

Some counties, including Miami Dade, are providing regular ballots to "no match" voters if they show up at the polls with matching identification. But this is not required under the law.

Counties that still refuse to grant a regular ballot are required, under the Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning's latest reading of the law, to allow "no-match" voters to turn in photocopies of their ID at the polls.

With new registrations favoring the Democrats by 2 - 1, disenfranchisement of a large numbers of voters would appear to be an obstruction of fair voting practice by Republican voting officials using the cover of law. With so much attention paid to the issue this time around, election officials have an opportunity to prove their fairness by demonstration of fair practice. And it might just improve their political future.

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