Judge Halts Florida Vote Suppression MeasureJeez. Not only is Hans von Spakovsky’s FEC nomination bound up in the Senate, but one of his pet causes, having states reject voter applications if the data does not match driver’s license or Social Security records, has hit a snag in Florida.
Civil rights groups argued that the policy amounted to “disenfranchisement-by-bureaucracy.” Now a federal judge has agreed:
U.S. District Judge Stephan Mickle on Tuesday sided with the NAACP’s request for a preliminary injunction suspending Florida’s 2-year-old “voter match” law while courts decide whether it violates federal laws protecting the right to vote….Lawyers for Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning contended the matching process is required to prevent voter fraud….
But in his order Tuesday, Mickle wrote that Florida’s match law “stands as an obstacle” to the objectives of the federal Help America Vote Act, by making it harder to vote.
“Though it is true that prevention of voter fraud and prevention of voter disenfranchisement were both goals of HAVA, the impetus for the Act was to respond to the millions of votes that went uncounted — not the millions of incidents of voter registration fraud,” Mickle wrote.