High court to review voting rights

With the election less than a month away, the Florida Supreme Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit demanding that all provisional ballots be counted regardless of where they are cast.

BY GARY FINEOUT  Miami Herald  06 October 2004

TALLAHASSEE - Many of Florida's voters may still get a chance to use a paper ballot on Election Day, thanks to a long-shot lawsuit that has rocketed forward to the state's highest court.

By a razor-thin margin, the Florida Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to take up a lawsuit challenging the law that overhauled the state's election system after the chaotic 2000 presidential election.

Justices voted to hold a hearing on the lawsuit on Oct. 13, setting up the possibility that they could order election supervisors to make substantial changes to Florida's election system days before voters head to the polls on Nov. 2.

A coalition of unions, including the AFL-CIO, want the court to order election supervisors to count so-called provisional ballots regardless of where the voter turned them in.

Provisional ballots were created in the 2001 election reform law as a way to guarantee that voters whose names don't show up on the voting rolls, perhaps through error, could still vote on Election Day. If a check shows the voter is indeed eligible to vote, the ballot is counted.

Provisional ballots are on paper, just like absentee ballots.

But the caveat added by state legislators is that provisional ballots must be discarded if the voter didn't go to the right precinct. Lawyers for the unions say this violates Florida's Constitution, which requires only that voters cast their ballots in their home county.

In a state that has been ravaged by four hurricanes, they also say that many precincts may be changed due to damages at polling places.

''That qualification is overly restrictive and really has no place in a democracy,'' said Alma Gonzalez, special counsel for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a plaintiff in the suit.

TURMOIL EXPECTED

But a lawyer for the state's election supervisors predicted widespread turmoil on Election Day if the court orders counties to count all provisional ballots.

Ron Labasky, who represents the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, said nothing would stop special interest groups from telling voters to go out and demand a provisional ballot at any precinct instead of using the touch-screen voting machines used in 15 counties, including Broward and Miami-Dade.

`JUST GO VOTE'

''You could have tens of thousands of people going just down the street to vote,'' Labasky said. 'The announcement could be, `Don't worry about where you vote, just go vote.' ''

The legal argument that Labasky and state lawyers will use to try to dissuade the court from changing the law is that provisional ballots are a protection of voter rights that wasn't in place prior to 2001.

''We were really not trying to restrict peoples rights in any way,'' said Rep. Dudley Goodlette, a Naples Republican and one of the architects of the 2001 election reform law. ``We were trying to eliminate the potential for voters to be disenfranchised.''