TALLAHASSEE – A non-profit advocacy group has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s process of verifying voter registration applications, alleging it violates federal laws.
The lawsuit, filed in the federal Middle District of Florida, focuses on the process for verifying voter registration applicants’ eligibility. Prospective voters are deemed eligible by election officials if certain identifying information entered into the state’s voter registration system lines up with data maintained by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles or the federal Social Security Administration. Applicants whose information does not produce an “exact match” are not allowed to vote “unless they overcome burdensome bureaucratic hurdles,” the lawsuit said.
The process “not only places the burden of verification on Black voters, it further disenfranchises Black eligible voters,” lawyers representing Florida Rising Together wrote in the lawsuit.
The group is a nonprofit “dedicated to advancing economic and racial justice across Florida by building power in historically marginalized communities,” according to the lawsuit. The state’s process is flawed, in part, because the federal database used to verify voter registration “is widely known to routinely produce false and inconsistent results,” the lawsuit alleged.
The lawsuit also said, “more than 43,000 individuals who submitted otherwise valid voter registration applications to Florida election officials since 2018 across 26 Florida counties have never been able to register to vote successfully solely due to the ‘exact match’ requirement.”
The state’s process “is compounded by a legacy of historic and deliberate disenfranchisement and interacts with the effects of racial and economic discrimination in access to the ballot that continue to plague Florida,” the lawsuit said. “Taken together, the ‘exact match’ protocol denies Black and other voters of color an equal opportunity to register to vote and participate in Florida’s political process and is a leading reason why voter registration applicants do not successfully make it onto Florida’s voter rolls.”
Florida Rising is represented by a coalition including Advancement Project, Community Justice Project, the Dechert LLP firm, and Florida A&M University Law School professor Mark Dorosin.
