Today, Advancement Project, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, and Project Vote won a preliminary injunction that blocks a Florida state law prohibiting applicants from registering to vote if the state cannot match or otherwise validate the driver’s license or Social Security number on a registration form. This law stood to disenfranchise tens of thousands of eligible applicants, particularly African-American and Latino voters, in the upcoming elections.
A federal court in Gainesville, Florida held that Florida’s law conflicts with both the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. HAVA requires every state to obtain a unique identifying number for voter registration applicants, but it does not make the “verification” of one’s ID number a pre-requisite for one’s eligibility to vote. As a result, the court ruled that Florida’s “matching” statute violates HAVA. The court also held that the matching process would result in thousands of eligible voters being denied the opportunity to vote “for reasons unrelated to their voter qualifications under the Florida Constitution,” thereby violating the Voting Rights Act.
Plaintiffs, the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, demonstrated that this law disproportionately impacts applicants of color. In 2006, individuals identifying as Hispanic American on their voter registration applications, who comprise 15% of all voter applicant population in Florida, constituted 34% of the unmatched applicants; individuals identifying as African American, comprising 13% of the voter applicant population, accounted for 22% of the unmatched applicants. By contrast, those identifying as white, who comprise 66% of all applicants, accounted for only 29% of the unmatched applicants.
Florida’s “no match, no vote” rule prevented thousands of eligible voters from registering to vote in 2006. The goal for Florida’s election officials in 2008 should be to ensure that all eligible citizens are afforded their right to register and that a registered voter is guaranteed the right to vote.