Honest Voting

The National Campaign for Fair Elections has an interesting blog full of tidbits like the ones you find here. Occasionally they’re better tidbits — hey, I’m not proud.

For example, I haven’t seen this story anywhere else. Marcia Johnson-Blanco followed up on a press release from the Brennan Center for Justice: A federal court in Florida has refused to stop the disenfranchisement of more than 16,000 of the state’s residents because of how they spell their name.

The overly stringent law has been previously challenged in federal court and requires that the name written on a voter registration form must be identical to that found on record from their driver’s license or social security number. The mistype of a single letter by an election worker is all it takes to disenfranchise a voter. As if that weren’t enough, a voter cannot even produce an alternate form of ID to prove his or her identity.

(The National Campaign for Fair Elections is an initiative of the Voting Rights Project, which is in turn a program sponsored by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group “created at the request of President John F. Kennedy in the summer of 1963 following a meeting of 244 lawyers in the East Room of the White House.”)

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