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.
Here’s a copy of my written testimony with Prof. Michael Herron, which I presented on January 27, 2012 in Tampa, Florida, before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, “New State Voting Laws II: Protecting the Right to Vote in the Sunshine State.”
Here are the slides I projected during my 7 minute oral testimony.
And here’s the link to the key plot showing by day the racial/ethnic early in-person voting in Florida in the 2008 General Election.
If you’re interested in discussing our testimony, please contact me at “president<at>electionsmith[dot]com“
“New State Voting Laws II: Protecting the Right to Vote in the Sunshine State”
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights
TIME: 01:00 PM
ROOM: Hillsborough County Courthouse
January 12, 2012
NOTICE OF SUBCOMMITTEE FIELD HEARING
The Senate Committee on the Judiciary has scheduled a field hearing of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights entitled “New State Voting Laws II: Protecting the Right to Vote in the Sunshine State” for Friday, January 27, 2012 at 1:00 p.m. at the Hillsborough County Courthouse, 800 E. Twiggs Street, Tampa, FL 33602.
Chairman Durbin to preside.
By order of the Chairman.
Witness List
Hearing before the
Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights
On
“New State Voting Laws II: Protecting the Right to Vote in the Sunshine State”
Friday, January 27, 2012
Hillsborough County Courthouse
800 E. Twiggs Street, Tampa, FL 33602
1:00 p.m.
Panel I
Michael Ertel
Supervisor of Elections, Seminole County
Sanford, FL
Ann McFall
Supervisor of Elections, Volusia County
DeLand, FL
Hon. Bruce Smathers
Former Secretary of State of Florida
Jacksonville, FL
Panel II
Daryl Parks
President
National Bar Association
Tallahassee, FL
Sara Pemberton
President
Florida College System Student Government Association
Clearwater, FL
Dr. Daniel A. Smith
Professor of Political Science
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL
Brent A. Wilkes
National Executive Director
League of United Latin American Citizens
Washington, DC
Here’s a link to the official announcement
Below is a Press Release from Senator Durbin’s Office
January 12, 2012
Durbin Announces Field Hearing on Florida Voting Law
January 27th Field Hearing Will Be Subcommittee’s First
[WASHINGTON, D.C.] – US Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, today announced a field hearing examining the impact of Florida’s new voting law, which restricts early voting and makes it harder for third-party groups to help people register to vote. The hearing will be held on January 27th, just days before the Florida Presidential Primary, at the Hillsborough County Courthouse in downtown Tampa.
Among other things, Florida’s new law reduces the number of early voting days from 14 to 8, prohibits early voting on the Sunday before an election, and creates a series of new administrative requirements for individuals and volunteer organizations that register voters. These new requirements and the hefty fines associated with them have led non-partisan organizations like Rock The Vote and the League of Women Voters to indefinitely suspend all voter registration efforts in Florida. Other witnesses will be announced at a later date, but Florida Governor Rick Scott has been asked to testify.
“For more than half of the life of our Republic, a majority of Americans were not allowed to vote. Fortunately, we learned from these mistakes and expanded the franchise and reach of our democracy though six constitutional amendments,” Durbin said. “Worryingly, a spate of recently passed state voting laws seemed designed to restrict voting by making it harder for millions of disabled, young, minority, rural, elderly, homeless, and low income Americans to vote. Protecting the right of every citizen to vote and ensuring that our elections are fair and transparent are not Democratic or Republican values, they are American values.”
“The fact is a number of states including Florida have made it harder for some people to vote,” said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), who led a call forthe committee to investigate Florida’s law. “We want to know why this is happening.”
Over thirty states have new or pending changes to current voting laws. States seeking to change their laws have passed or proposed provisions that significantly reduce the number of early voting days, require voters to show restrictive forms of photo identification before voting and make it harder for volunteer organizations to register new voters. Supporters of these laws argue that they will reduce the risk of voter fraud. The overwhelming evidence, however, indicates that voter fraud is virtually non-existent and that these new laws will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of elderly, disabled, minority, young, rural, and low-income Americans to exercise their right to vote.
The Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights held a hearing on these new state voting laws in September of last year. More information on that hearing can be found here. Following this hearing, Senator Durbin sent a letter to Governor Scott asking whether the Governor planned to take any action to ensure that the Florida voting law would not disenfranchise Floridians. To date, Governor Scott has not responded to that letter.
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.
Voting Rights in Hillsborough County, as I’ve blogged before, are still covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
As such, voters in Hillsborough are granted federal protections that neighboring voters in Pinellas County are not afforded. These distinctions have recently come into question with the Florida legislature’s passage of the Republican-sponsored voter suppression bill, HB 1355, and the US Justice Department’s refusal thus far to “pre-clear” all of the legislation.
Since Pinellas County residents are covered by Section 5 of the Voting Right Act, under HB 1355, they might have a harder time registering to vote, casting an early ballot, and moving within the county prior to election day than a neighbor living in Hillsborough County. For example, if a registered Tampa Republican who moves within Hillsborough County prior to Jan 31 presidential primary may still cast a valid ballot, but a similar St. Pete resident who moves within Pinellas County must file a provisional ballot. As we know, a fraction of all provisional ballots that are cast are actually counted.
Is this fair? Will some Republicans in Florida become disenfranschised or have a more difficult time casting a ballot because of HB 1355? The National Journal has more, here.
