BlogWood: MT Archives

Republicans get 2nd chance; Dems left to sue

Manatee County is mostly Republican. In Manatee County, if a newly registered voter made a mistake on a registration form, the voter has been given a chance to correct the application in time to vote this November. This is laudable.

The only problem is that in just about every other county in Florida, the local elections chiefs are following the directive of the Florida Secretary of State and are rejecting thousands of applications because they contain tiny little inconsequential errors or omissions.

So, if you live in a wealthy, mostly Republican county, you have a better chance of being able to vote this year than your neighbors who live in, let’s say, Jacksonville, a city with a high percentage of black Democratic voters where 25,000 or so votes were thrown out in 2000 due to “spoilage.”

Supervisor of Elections Bob Sweat is giving Manatee County residents a chance to correct any mistakes they made recently on the Florida voter registration form, and he intends to still let them vote in the Nov. 2 general election.

Sweat plans to allow at least 41 county residents who filed incomplete registration applications by the Monday deadline to belatedly fill in the blanks without losing eligibility to vote next month.

He has allowed after-the-deadline corrections to be made by registration applicants for years, but it is unclear whether the Florida Division of Elections or courts may step in soon and stop his practice.

"This will probably end up in court like everything else," said Sweat, a Republican first elected in 1984.

Sweat said he did not know how many of the 41 applicants asked to be registered as Democrats, Republicans, no party affiliation, wrote in the name of another party or left that voluntary question blank.

"I didn't bother to look," he said.

He said he realizes that flawed registration applications have been declared invalid and voters thus ruled ineligible to vote by election supervisors in other counties.

Sweat said the law gives no clear direction on whether incomplete applications may be amended after the deadline and still leave those prospective voters eligible to vote, so he will give applicants the benefit of the doubt.

"I don't mind standing up for this. I think I'm right," Sweat said Thursday. "My feeling has always been, if I had the application by the deadline and it was signed (by the applicant), we would give you the opportunity to make corrections. If the law is not specific, if we err, we err on the side of the voter."

"It would have saved us a lot of work just to reject them, but that isn't right," he said. "The intent to register is there."

What a simple and elegant concept: if the intent to register is there and the applicant makes a simple mistake, allow the application to be fixed. Too bad this theory is only applied in a Republican county.