Years ago, the deadline to register to vote in Florida was set at 29 days before the election.
The reason was simple. Four weeks gave elections offices enough time to put together the most comprehensive list of voters available – a giant, printed book.
Today, we live in an age of instantaneous communication, massive databases and several ways to verify identity. And the voter registration deadline in Florida is still 29 days before the election.
“Many laws don’t get changed as technology changes,” said Orange County elections supervisor Bill Cowles.
The early registration deadline is just one example of how the state’s elections laws “are as arbitrary as they come,” said Florida ACLU executive director Micah Kubic.
Mail-in ballots need to be delivered by the end of Election Day – leaving the fate of many ballots to the Post Office. Thousands of ballots were rejected for mismatched signatures, often because voters awkwardly signed on electronic pads. Many other states have same-day registration or, in one case, no registration at all.
But one year after an incredibly close 2018 election exposed serious flaws in those laws – and led to the first real changes in years – many critics and voting rights experts still say the voter experience in Florida continues to disenfranchise thousands of people.
And that’s with the 2020 presidential election now just a year away.
“We have built this huge election infrastructure on top of very shaky ground,” said Daniel Smith, political science chair at the University of Florida. “It’s like a Jenga game. You [start] with a fairly strong, solid foundation, and pieces have been pulled out and pieces have been placed on the top. … There’s just an edifice that is increasingly shaky.”
Elections officials, however, said changing how the state does elections wouldn’t be as simple as extending deadlines. Even a small change would have huge repercussions.
“Everything is sort of a domino effect,” said Okaloosa County elections supervisor Paul Lux. “When you move one marker, everything else falls over.”
‘Print out a receipt and you go vote’
This weekend, the Florida Democratic Party is holding what chair Terrie Rizzo said was its largest-ever voter registration drive, led by more than 30 organizers at 10 colleges, including the University of Central Florida.
The party needed to start this early, Rizzo said, because the registration deadline for the 2020 general election of Oct. 5 can sneak up on people.
“It’s important to get out early and make sure people know in advance that there is a 29-day registration [deadline],” she said. “I personally wish we had same-day voter registration. That’s unfortunate, but we have the laws we have.”
In Florida, where about 13 million out of a voting-eligible population of about 17 million were registered as of October 2018, registration peaks in the months right before elections – until the deadline hits.
Jessica Barba Brown, CEO of the Voter Participation Center, a Washington-based progressive nonprofit group, said there was “no question a 29-day deadline disenfranchises huge numbers of voters.”
“People especially who might be lower-income, who are from communities of color, people who are dealing with multiple pressures in their lives, don’t necessarily have the luxury to think about things like election deadlines,” Brown said. “And they’re only starting to tune in close to the election.”
Across the country, 20 states and the District of Columbia have registration deadlines of 15 days or less before Election Day. And 11 of those allow registration as late as Election Day itself, including Wisconsin, Colorado and Minnesota.
In North Dakota, there’s no registration whatsoever.
“It works very well,” said Michael Montplaisir, the election officer in Fargo. “You need to have either a driver’s license or a non-driving state-issued ID. … You simply show us that, we record it on a computer, we print out a receipt, and you go and vote.”
The only other requirement, he said, is proof they have lived in the precinct for at least 30 days.
“North Dakota was one of the first states to have had registration” in the 1890s, Montplaisir said. “And it was the only state to get rid of it, back in the ’50s.”
That state’s unusual election laws, Kubic of the Florida ACLU said, show “the idea that voter registration itself is not a given. I think we sometimes confuse the system that we have for the system that must be. And that’s not the case.”
Calling registration deadlines an “artifact,” Kubic said same-day registration “is the single best tool for increasing voter participation in this country. Across the board, Republican, Democrat, black, white, young, old, every single group participates more in the states that have Election Day registration rather than this purely arbitrary, bureaucratic red tape of a deadline.”
Cowles and Lux, though, cautioned that Florida’s constantly shifting population would make same-day registration much more difficult than in rural states such as North Dakota.
“The problem in Florida is the mobility rate,” Cowles said. “How much movement within a state? How much mobility of people into a state? It’s all you can do to monitor just voters moving between counties – Orange, Osceola, Seminole.”
Lux noted the push for same-day registration also overlooks the number of documents needed for a voter to prove who they are.
“The irony is the people who are pro-same day registration are likely in the same camp as the anti-voter ID people,” Lux said. “What they probably do not realize is the ID requirement for same-day registration is much more strong than just ‘show me your driver’s license.’ There’s also a proof of residency requirement on top of that.”
Florida’s lack of a strict voter ID law, despite being controlled by Republicans, is probably due to its own political factors, Smith said.
“We have a lot of snowbirds,” Smith said. “Old people with IDs that are expired.”
Lux said he sees the potential benefits of same-day registration. But he maintained that in Florida, “registration could not be easier. Anyone who wants to be registered can do it at DMVs, libraries, post offices. I find it incredible that people are not registered because they don’t know how to get registered.”
And if Florida were to ever change its registration laws, Lux said, “it would require an enormous amount of planning and foresight to implement something like that. Years and years of foresight, not ‘pass a law, implement it in July.’
‘Florida wants to be the kingmaker’
The most controversial parts of Florida’s election laws in 2018 dealt with mail-in ballots.
In an election in which then-U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson lost to U.S. Sen. Rick Scott by a little more than 10,000 votes, about 10,000 people across the state had their vote-by-mail ballot rejected by county elections offices for mismatched signatures or other forms of “voter error,” according to Smith.
Many voters, including 2016 U.S. Senate candidate Patrick Murphy, found out about the rejections too late to do anything about it. The deadline to fix or “cure” ballots was one day before the deadline for elections offices to receive the ballots in the first place.
After a lawsuit gave voters a few more days to fix signature issues, the Legislature passed a bill making some of the biggest changes to election policy in years. It extended the deadline to cure signature issues until two days after an election and also moved back the deadline to request mail-in ballots from six to 10 days before an election so voters won’t be scrambling at the last minute.
It also allows vote-by-mail ballots to be dropped off at any early voting site.
“One of the vanishingly few good things that the Legislature did this year was to take some positive steps on the signature matching issue,” Kubic said. “It doesn’t solve the entire problem, but it was a step forward.”
Florida is also ahead of the curve by allowing voting by mail, Smith said. Many states still don’t have it, and Pennsylvania, Alabama and 17 other states require a legitimate excuse to do it.
But in states such as New Jersey, ballots only have to be postmarked by Election Day. In Florida, local ballots still have to be delivered to elections offices by the time the polls close that day. Overseas ballots have an extra 10 days to come in, but only for general elections and presidential primaries.
“This is driven by the fact that Florida wants to be the kingmaker in elections,” Smith said. “They want to be able to tell what our final results are by 8 p.m., 10 p.m. on election day. And you can’t do that if a third of the ballots are not counted [until later].”
Lux said he isn’t opposed to allowing pre-election postmarked ballots, instead of relying on the Post Office to deliver before 7 p.m. that Tuesday. Especially after situations such as what happened last year in Miami-Dade, when hundreds of ballots sat in a distribution center until after the election.
“The U.S. mail first-class delivery guarantee is three to five days,” Lux said. “If you mail a ballot that late it can’t possibly make it in time. We get emails on election day, ‘I’m overseas, how do I get my ballot back to you?’ Holy cow, they had their ballot almost two months.”
The cramped nature of the election calendar, with primaries just 11 weeks before the general election, also makes it almost impossible to extend any vote-by-mail deadlines without overlapping on other deadlines.
“You’d have to extend the whole election schedule – the primary schedule, candidate qualifying, petition deadlines, qualifying for federal candidates,” Lux said.
And because of the reason Florida’s calendar is so squeezed, Cowles added, he didn’t expect any changes any time soon.
The legislative session, Cowles said, was traditionally in March and April, “and campaigns can’t raise money during this period. So they didn’t want a spring primary. You can’t raise money and be ready for primary in the spring.”
Tammy Jones, current president of the Florida State Association of Supervisor of Elections, said she wasn’t opposed to later mail-in deadlines either.
But the issue remained, she said, that “there has to be a deadline. It’s just, when is the deadline supposed to be?”
‘I hate the word ‘purge”
The part of the law that has roiled voting reform advocates the most are the purges of the voter rolls, in which thousands of “inactive” voters are removed.
Though the official term, said Cowles, is “‘List maintenance.’ I hate the word ‘purge.'”
Elections offices are required to go over the lists every two years, though the dates vary from county to county.
They look at any registered voter who hasn’t voted in the past two federal elections – in this year’s case, 2018 and 2016 – and mail out letters to check if they still live at that address. If the letter comes back with a yellow, “no longer at this address” sticker from the post office, a voter is placed in the “inactive” category.”
If they haven’t voted in four years, they’re deleted from the rolls.
List maintenance serves many purposes, Cowles said. It lets offices know how many ballots to buy for the next election and not overspend, and it allows for better maps to be created to redraw precincts.
It also helps candidates, Cowles added.
“They want clean lists,” he said. “They don’t want to be mailing to people not here. It goes to the cost of running campaigns too.”
But purges have been condemned by voter reform advocates for how they have been done, both in Florida and nationwide. Gov. Scott’s attempt to remove all non-citizens from the rolls in 2012 was ruled illegal after voting-eligible naturalized citizens were removed incorrectly without enough time to fix the mistake.
In Ohio this year, a list of 235,000 voters planned to be removed turned out to be wrong for about 40,000 of them.
“All of these small decisions that seem like they are purely administrative or even trivial, they all add up and can make it so that fewer people participate in our democracy,” Kubic said. “And I think the purges are a perfect example of this.”
When someone is removed, he said, they usually don’t find out about it until it’s too late – usually well past the 29-day deadline.
Many of those caught up in purges are also minorities. In Georgia, the group Campaign Legal Center filed a lawsuit claiming that more than 80% of voters whose registrations were falsely placed in limbo before the 2016 election were African American, Latino and Asian-American. A similar lawsuit was filed against Ohio’s voter removal process, which was recently allowed by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
“We can pretend like it’s an administrative thing, but really, it is at least temporary denial of the right to vote,” Kubic said. “It doesn’t frankly matter all that much whether the intent is to be racially discriminatory. The results speak for themselves.”
slemongello@orlandosentinel.com
