Looking forward to giving a talk at Miami-Dade College Friday morning on impact of Florida’s HB1355 on Hispanic registration & early voting

Press Release available here:

Miami Dade College to Host Symposium on Hispanic Influence in the 2012 Presidential Election

Miami, May 2, 2012 – Miami Dade College’s (MDC) Center for Latin American and Caribbean Initiatives (CLACI) and the University of Florida (UF) Association of Hispanic Alumni (AHA) will present a symposium on the significant role and influence of Hispanics in the 2012 Presidential Election. The symposium will take place on Friday, May 11, from 8:30 to noon at MDC’s Wolfson Campus in downtown Miami. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

The role of the Hispanic electorate is rising in the U.S. Latinos are the fastest growing minority in the nation and their vote may go from being influential to being decisive in the next presidential election. The panel will disaggregate the Hispanic vote and look at the different Hispanic communities across the nation, their electoral preferences and their potential role in defining key races in important states. Panelists will also discuss Latino electoral preferences in connection to key policy topics, such as immigration reform, the economy, educational policy, and U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

Guest panelists will include MDC Social Science Chair Dr. Victor Vazquez-Hernandez, UF Political Science Professor Dr. Daniel A. Smith and UF Political Science Professor Dr. Richard Scher. The moderators will be CLACI’s Executive Director Carlos Barrezueta and Dr. Michael Martinez, professor and chair of UF’s Political Science department.

The symposium is part of the events leading to the AHA’s signature event, the Ninth Annual Gator Guayabera Guateque (GGG), which raises funds for scholarships for minority students (many who are Hispanic) to attend UF. Both UF and MDC students have received scholarships from the AHA and as a result of this event. The GGG gala will be held in the Doral Golf Resort & Spa on May 19.

Symposium on Hispanic Influence in the 2012 Presidential Election

WHEN: Friday, May 11, 8:30 AM – 12:00 PM
WHERE: MDC Wolfson Campus, 300 NE Second Ave. Building 2, Room 2106

To register for the symposium, please send an e-mail toufahaevents@gmail.com.

For more information, please contact Maggie Sequeira at 305-237-3501, msequeira@uff.ufl.edu.

Does Offering Postage to Voters Mailing in Absentee Ballots Constitute Vote Buying?

An interesting case coming out of Davie, Florida.

The Orlando Sentinel has the details.

Think Your Provisional Ballot in Florida Counts? Think Again

In the 2008 general election, Florida voters cast some 35,635 provisional ballots on Election Day.  That’s but a fraction of the more than 8.3 million ballots cast in the election, but in close elections, local, state House and Senate, or even presidential, they could determine the outcome an election.

But unlike regular ballots cast by voters, provisional ballots–despite what we’re told–often don’t count.  In fact, in the 2008 general election, less than half of all provisional ballots cast were actually deemed to be valid.  Days after the polls closed on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, and long after the unofficial results were posted by the Secretary of State and broadcast by the media, local three-member canvassing boards in the state’s 67 counties opened thousands of envelopes containing provisional ballots and began to tabulate them.

Whether they count, is another question altogether.  Of the 35,635 provisional ballots cast in the 2008 general election, local canvassing boards validated only 17,312, or less than 50%.

The dirty little secret in the Sunshine State is that provisional ballots often don’t count. Or at least they don’t count as frequently in some counties as in others. There are innumerable reasons for the disparity, but the disparity exists. For whatever reason, provisional ballots cast by registered voters don’t have an equal shot of being accepted by local canvassing boards. The assault on voting rights by the Florida legislature in 2011, with the passage of HB1355, will likely increase the proportion of provisional ballots cast in the 2012 general election, and could very well lead to an even lower likelihood that provisional ballots will be validated.

In the 2008 general election there was a tremendous amount of variation across the state’s 67 counties regarding the number of provisional ballots cast and the percentage that were actually added to the final tabulation.  In six counties, all of them largely rural, all of the provisional ballots cast (a total of 54) were deemed to be valid by the county canvasing boards (Baker (0/0); Dixie (11/11); Hamilton (12/12); Holmes (13/13); Lafayette (3/3); and Suwannee (15/15)).

Other counties, as this Provisional Ballots Chart reveals, also had high percentages of validated provisional ballots.  For example, over 82 percent of the 731 provisional ballots cast in St. Johns County, 72 percent of the 411 provisional ballots cast in Pasco County, and nearly 60 percent of the 4,659 provisional ballots cast in Hillsborough (a Section 5 Voting Right Act county) were added to the total vote.

This 2008 Provisional Ballot Plot, crafted by my collaborator, Dartmouth University Professor Michael Herron, helps the visualization of where provisional ballots were cast in Florida in the 2008 general election. The proportion of the total votes cast in each county that were provisional ballot runs along the horizontal axis, and the percentage of provisional ballots cast in each county that were validated by the 67 county canvassing boards runs up the vertical axis. The size of the dot is proportional to the total number of provisional ballots cast, as distributed across the 67 counties.

There are several outliers, but two are pretty dramatic: Broward County, with its paltry acceptance rate of cast provisional ballots, and Osceola County, with its exceptionally high proportion of provisional ballots cast.

As I’ve written elsewhere with Dr. Herron, the rate of provisional ballots, the acceptance rate of provisional ballots, and the variation across counties should all be of grave concern as we head into the 2012 general election.

In the coming months, we’ll be investigating why there might be so much variation in the casting and counting of provisional ballots in Florida.  I suspect it’s quite likely that these clear disparities across Florida’s 67 counties are not out of the ordinary when it comes to voting provisional ballots in other states.

PEW: Florida Secretary of State’s Election Website Receives High Marks

So says the Pew Center on the States.

Florida ranks 7th overall in the PEW study, receiving “excellent” marks on “content” and solid marks for “lookup tools,” but it ranks in the bottom half of the states when it comes to the “usability” of the Secretary of State’s website.

Here’s a link to PEW’s evaluation of Florida, which is excerpted below:

 

Researchers assessed state election websites for the Pew Center on the States between May-November 2010 using detailed criteria evaluating the content, lookup tools, and usability. Websites may have changed since they were assessed. See methodology (PDF).

Strengths include:

• Comprehensive voter registration and ballot information, including details on registration eligibility and residency requirements, deadlines, forms, and information for college students, felons, the homeless, hospitalized voters, and voters residing in long-term-care facilities.
• Concise, quickly absorbed text used throughout the website, with easy-to-scan bullet points and hyperlinks.
• Lookup tools that allow voters to view their registration status, polling place location, sample ballots, and absentee ballot status.
• Comprehensive listings of candidates and candidate party affiliations, contact information, and incumbency status.
• Full texts, summaries, and nonpartisan analyses of statewide ballot measures.
• Campaign finance data links for state and federal candidates.
• Election results in a section that displays them in user-friendly ways, such as by county, in percentages, and with maps.
• Text resizing function helps visually impaired users.

Recommended improvements include:

• Create a section of information geared toward people with disabilities (36 states offer).
• Use more specific informational labels for links to guide users to content from the home page, rather than vague labels such as “Voter Information.”
• Improve navigation throughout the website so that it is logical and consistent on each page and makes important information prominent and accessible.
• To avoid confusion, place lookup tools on a page that does not look like a different site.
• Improve the lookup tool’s accessibility for visitors with screen-reader software, which cannot “see” the squiggly words (CAPTCHA System) that a user must enter.
• Explain how to obtain a replacement if a requested absentee ballot does not arrive in the mail (19 states offer), or is lost or damaged (18 offer).
• Provide a tutorial on how to complete a ballot (38 states offer).
• Offer instructions for people with disabilities on how to use voting machines at polling places (33 states offer).
• Provide a lookup tool for voters to check the status of their provisional ballot (19 states offer).
• Present important information in HTML format rather than in PDF documents, which are more difficult to read and search online.

Noteworthy Feature: A “Candidate Tracking System” tracks candidates throughout the election process, describing their status, campaign finance activity, personal photos, and contact data. This information is updated regularly as candidates file and update their information.

Initial Quick Fix: Include a noticeable link from the state website home page to the voting information website.

Summary: Florida’s site scores highly and provides excellent voting information, including four out of five recommended lookup tools. Improved navigation and accessibility for voters with visual disabilities would enhance usability.

http://election.dos.state.fl.us/index.shtml was assessed for content, lookup tools, and usability.

11 Florida Lawmakers Receive Subpoenas in HB1355 Election Law Case

Steve Bousquet, the long-time St. Petersburg Times Tallahassee reporter, has a must read column on the 11 Republican state lawmakers who have been issued subpoenas in a federal lawsuit involving four provisions of Florida’s controversial election law, HB1355. The lawsuit deals with the question of whether the US Justice Department should “preclear” the changes for five Florida counties, as required under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

According to Bosquet, “The lawmakers, most of whom supported the legislation, are ordered to produce by Dec. 14 ‘all documents’ related to the four major election law changes at issue in the case.”

The most interesting comment in the story, I think, is from Representative Jimmy Patronis, a Republican from Panama City,who chaired the House Government Operations Subcommittee, which first considered HB1355.

Patronis, who supported HB1355, admitted to Bousquet that Bay County Supervisor of Elections, Mark Andersen, had urged him not curtail the number of early voting days, saying that Andersen, “told me how much the constituents love early voting.” Of course, these also happen to be Patronis’ constituents. But Patronis obviously had broader Republican Party interests in mind–and not his own constituents’–when he curtailed convenience voting in Florida.

[Incidentally, Bousquet gets it wrong when he says HB1355 keeps the total number of early voting hours at 96. It doesn't. Under the new law, Supervisors of Elections need only offer a minimum of six hours of early voting a day over the shortened eight day early in-person voting period, for a total of 48 hours, as Politifact Florida points out].

Anyway, the subpoenas from the GOP 11 should produce some interesting reading.

Will Florida’s Dual Election System Breathe Life into Bush v. Gore?

Last week, the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, denied a complaint by Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning  challenging sections of the Voting Rights Act.  The Florida Secretary of State was seeking an expedited hearing on whether HB1355, Florida’s controversial legislation overhauling voting rights and election administration in the state, complied with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires federal preclearance for five Florida counties (Collier, Hardee, Hendry, Hillsborough, and Monroe).  Secretary of State Browning is requesting that the federal district court approve portions of the new law–specifically third party voter registration, out-of-­county address changes, petition signature verification, and early voting–rather than waiting for US Department of Justice’s preclearance.

Although on hold for the five counties awaiting US Justice Department preclearance, the Florida Division of Elections has been working with the Supervisors of Elections in the remaining 62 counties not covered by Section 5 of the VRA to implement the many new provisions under HB1355 (Chapter 2011-40) in anticipation of the January 31 Presidential Preference Primary.

However, under Florida law, the state must provide uniform standards for the proper and equitable implementation of the voter registration laws. It is the responsibility of the Florida Secretary of State, as unambiguously stated on the Florida Division of Elections website, “to ensure statewide uniformity in the interpretation of the election laws.”

But the uneven implementation of HB1355 continues, unabated.

Clearly, Florida’s dual election system is not treating all Floridians the same.  As the Brennan Center noted back in June:

• The new voter registration regulations would be in force in some counties but not others, unfairly and unlawfully creating two separate sets of rules governing voter registration in different parts of the state.
• Some counties would unfairly be left with a dramatically shorter early voting period than others, as the new law cuts the opportunity for early voting to fourteen days to eight
• Floridians who moved recently would have varying difficulty voting depending on their new county of residence, as implementation of the new law would end Florida’s longstanding policy of allowing citizens who have recently moved to easily change their registration address on Election Day and vote normally at their poll site.
  

In denying the state’s request for an expedited hearing and decision, the federal district court’s decision to wait until May to hear oral arguments has virtually assured that the January 31 PPP will be conducted with two sets of election laws, which directly conflicts with existing Florida statutes. But of course, the blame doesn’t lie at the feet of the federal district court. It lies at the feet of the Republican-controlled legislature and the Office of the Secretary of State, who has a constituency of one: Governor Scott.

Again, the Brennan Center in a letter to Secretary Browning on behalf of several voting rights advocacy groups, nails it:

Under Florida statute § 97.012 and prior advisory opinions by the Division, the Secretary of State has a duty to ensure uniformity in the application, operation, and interpretation of the state’s election laws. Applying HB 1355’s extensive changes to the voting and voter registration process only in certain counties, but not in the five counties for which preclearance is required under the federal Voting Rights Act before implementing voting changes, clearly conflicts with this legal mandate.

We therefore request that you immediately advise all Supervisors of Elections that the provisions of H.B. 1355 are unenforceable until they can be applied uniformly in all Florida counties, as state law requires.

Of course, uneven implementation of voting and election laws also violates federal law.  In 2002, Congress passed and President Bush signed into law the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). HAVA was Congress’s effort to clean up the mess in Florida resulting from the 2000 presidential recount.  In order for Florida and other states to receive the billions of dollars appropriated to improve the electoral process, state elections officials were required to implement numerous reforms mandated under HAVA.

Among its many provisions, HAVA requires that the states  “implement in a uniform and nondiscriminatory manner, a single, uniform, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list defined, maintained, and administered at the state level.” By most all accounts, Florida achieved by the January 1, 2006 federal deadline, with the Florida Voter Registration System (FVRS).  The implementation of HB1355 in 62 counties, but not the other 5, is clearly in violation of HAVA.

Bush v. Gore may be dead (or at least dormant), but Florida’s Dual Election System may breathe some new life into it.

Florida Early Voting

Professor Michael Herron (Dartmouth) and I look forward to sharing our findings on early voting in Florida in the 2008 election at the 2012 State Politics and Policy Conference to be held in Houston, TX on February 16-18, when we present our paper, “The Participatory Impact of Truncating Early Voting in Florida.” It’s pretty timely, given all the attention that Florida US Senators Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio have given to early voting and HB1355.

Here’s our Abstract (tentative):

Over the past two decades, an increasing number of American states have made it more convenient for potential voters to cast early ballots.  Starting with Texas’ adoption of in-person early voting in 1988, 32 states now provide an extended time period prior to Election Day for voters to go to the polls.  Despite the diffusion of and praise by voting rights advocates for early voting, in 2011 the Florida legislature enacted House Bill 1355, which truncated the state’s early voting period from a total of 14 days to eight days and completely eliminated  early voting on the Sunday immediately preceding Election Day.  Critics of the legislation contend the surreptitious goal of the Republican-controlled legislature was to depress African American early voting turnout in 2012.

In this paper, we draw on an original dataset to gauge the potential participatory ramifications of HB 1355 by examining patterns of early voting in the 2008 general election.  By merging the state’s 2008 voter file, comprised of more than 11.3 million registered voters, with the state’s November 2008 early voter file, we are able to assess and study the race and ethnicity, party registration, age, gender, precinct/county registration, and vote history of each registered voter, including those who cast an early ballot, in 2008.

Unlike many studies of early voting in the American states which rely on aggregate-level data, we are able to pinpoint not only which voters were more likely to cast early ballots—specifically their socio-demographic characteristics—but we can also describe on which day during the two-week period in 2008 that they voted.  We employ a variety of multivariate models to test the conventional wisdom that African American voters are more likely than whites to vote early, and vote on Sunday, and that older and partisan voters vote early more often (Stein 1998). In addition, using a voter’s vote history to model early voting, we challenge the growing scholarly consensus—which is based largely on survey data—that early voting merely retains engaged voters (Stein 1998; Neely and Richardson 2001; Berinsky 2005; Kousser and Mullen 2007; Burden, et al. 2011; Gronke, Galanes-Rosenbaum, and Miller 2008) rather than stimulating peripheral voters.

Will Florida Election Law #HB1355 Increase Absentee Ballot Voter Fraud?

I’ve been writing a lot over the past five months about House Bill 1355, dubbed by many as Florida’s ignominious voter suppression law. HB1355  is being challenge in federal court, and the US Justice Department has yet to grant preclearance of portions of the law which cover five Florida counties covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.  Defending the law, the Florida Secretary of State is suing in Federal Court to not only uphold all sections of the law, but to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Most of the attention that I and others have given to HB1355 has focused on three areas that the GOP-controlled legislature cracked down on in order to make it more difficult for citizens of Florida to register to vote and cast a ballot, namely:

1) Reducing the number of days for early voting from 14 days to eight days, and altogether eliminating early voting on the Sunday before the Tuesday election.

2) Requiring third-party voter registration organizations to submit voter registration applications within 48 hours of receipt instead of ten days as provided by existing law, and imposing a fine of $50 for each failure to comply with the deadline, and imposing fines up to $1,000 for failing to comply with other provisions.

3) Disallowing voters who move from one Florida county to another to make an address change at the polls on the day of an election and vote a regular ballot, except for active military voters and their family members.

(Less attention has been given to the portion of the law that reduces the shelf-life of citizen initiative petition signatures proposing constitutional amendments from four years to two years.)

Virtually no attention has been given to HB1355′s impact on absentee voting in Florida. The reason is fairly simple: the law has actually made it easier for citizens to cast an absentee ballot, and actually, increases the likelihood of voter fraud.

Absentee ballot fraud is not limited to Miami mayoral races. Just yesterday, several people in Madison County, including a candidate for school board, were arrested and charged with obtaining absentee ballots for other people without the voters’ knowledge or consent.  The candidate and her accomplices then provided an alternate address for the ballots to be mailed by the Supervisor of Elections, and allegedly then retrieved the ballots from the third party locations, brought the ballots to the voter, sometimes with the ballots already filled out, and then had the voter sign the absentee ballot signature envelope.

Tragically, HB1355 eliminates the provision that existed in 2010 when the fraud occurred, making future absentee ballot fraud more difficult to prosecute. Prior to the election code being changed by the Republican legislature in 2011, Supervisors of Elections were required to send absentee ballot to a voter’s registered address, unless the voter was absent from the county, hospitalized, or temporarily unable to occupy their residence.

But these provisions to reduce the possibility of absentee voter fraud were stricken by HB1355.  Instead of being required (with the forgoing exceptions) to send an absentee ballot “By nonforwardable, return-if-undeliverable mail to the elector’s current mailing address on file with the supervisor,” supervisors now may be asked by anyone (even over the phone) to mail an absentee ballot “to any other address the elector specifies in the request.”

HB1355 is an embarrassment, plain and simple. The Republican-controlled legislature’s intention was not to reduce voter fraud, of which there is virtually none when it comes to voter registration and early voting.  The reason lawmakers turned a blind eye to absentee ballots in the state–where there is clear evidence of voter fraud–is because registered Republicans are much more likely to use this form of convenience voting than their Democratic counterparts.  In 2008, Republicans had a 10.8% lead over Democrats voting absentee ballots by Election Day.

Partisan politics in Florida have reached a new low.

Why the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature Limited Voter Registration

I’ve written a considerable amount about the negative impact HB1355 likely will have on early voting in Florida. But the regressive law also affects the ability of Florida citizens to register to vote.

The Republican-controlled legislature’s rationale for the law–steeped in the anti-democratic rhetoric of making voting a privilege, not a right–continues to conjur up vestiges of Jim Crowism. “We’re going to have a very tight election here next year, and we need to protect the integrity of the election,” said Rep. Dennis Baxley, a Republican from Ocala. “When we looked around, we saw a need for some tightening.”

With respect to the severe restrictions placed on “third parties” (including individual citizens) interested in helping fellow citizens to register to vote, Republican lawmakers are surely cognizant of the surge of African Americans who registered to vote in Florida prior to the 2008 general election.

As I write with my co-author, Stephanie Slade (who works for The Winston Group, a Republican pollster based in DC) in a recent article on the 2008 election in Florida, “Obama to Blame? African American Surge Voters and the Ban on Same-Sex Marriage in Florida,”

Between December of 2007 and October of 2008, an additional 233,130 black Floridians registered to vote, a group of citizens we have referred to as the Obama-inspired African American surge. If these voters turned out at the same rate as the Florida electorate as a whole in the 2008 presidential election (74.6 percent), black surge voters would have constituted 173,915 of 8.39 million total votes cast for all the presidential candidates.

The numbers speak for themselves.

This spring, Republican lawmakers changed the rules to try to ensure that there will be no African American “surge voters” in 2012.

It will be up to the US Justice Department, as well as several interveners (including the ACLU, NAACP, and the League of Women Voters)–but ultimately the federal courts–to determine whether they ultimately succeed in their effort to suppress the vote in Florida.

Disclosure of Popular Referendum Ballot Signatures Affirmed by Federal District Court

Big news on ballot initiative disclosure today from the United States District Court in Tacoma, WA. The federal judge granted summary judgment in the Doe v. Reed remand, dismissing the remaining as-applied challenge to the application of Washington’s Public Records Act disclosure requirement for signature pages of Referendum 71, an effort to repeal the legislature’s bill granting same-sex civil union protections.

The opinion, following Justice Scalia’s wisdom that public disclosure is necessary and belittles the weak factual record produced by the plaintiffs, noted that “if a group could succeed in an as-applied challenge to the PRA by simply providing a few isolated incidents of profane or indecent statements, gestures, or other examples of uncomfortable conversations that are not necessarily even related or directly connected to the issue at hand, disclosure would become the exception instead of the rule.”

Ruling here and some excerpts, (via Rick Hasen):

More from the opinion:

Applied here, the Court finds that Doe has only supplied evidence that hurts rather than helps its case. Doe has supplied minimal testimony from a few witnesses who, in their respective deposition testimony, stated either that police efforts to mitigate reported incidents was sufficient or unnecessary. Doe has supplied no evidence that police were or are now unable or unwilling to mitigate any claimed harassment or are now unable or unwilling to control the same, should disclosure be made. This is a quite different situation than the progeny of cases providing an as-applied exemption wherein the government was actually involved in carrying out the harassment, which was historic, pervasive, and documented. To that end, the evidence supplied by Doe purporting to be the best set of experiences of threats, harassment, or reprisals suffered or reasonably likely to be suffered by R-71 signers cannot be characterized as “serious and widespread.”

……

Considering the foregoing, Doe’s action based on Count II falls far short of those  an as-applied challenge has been successfully lodged to prevent disclosure of information otherwise obtainable under the PRA. Thus, the State’s undoubtedly important interest in disclosure prevails under exacting scrutiny.

While Plaintiffs have not shown serious and widespread threats, harassment, or reprisals against the signers of R-71, or even that such activity would be reasonably likely to occur upon the publication of their names and contact information, they have developed substantial evidence that the public advocacy of traditional marriage as the exclusive definition of marriage, or the expansion of rights for same sex partners, has engendered hostility in this state, and risen to violence elsewhere, against some who have engaged in that advocacy. This should concern every citizen and deserves the full attention of law enforcement when the line gets crossed and an advocate becomes the victim of a crime or is subject to a genuine threat of violence. The right of individuals to speak openly and associate with others who share common views without justified fear of harm is at the very foundation of preserving a free and open society. The facts before the Court in this case, however, do not rise to the level of demonstrating that a reasonable probability of threats, harassment, or reprisals exists as to the signers of R-71, now nearly two years after R-71 was submitted to the voters in Washington State.