Florida’s move to a high-tech nationwide compact to ensure accurate voting rolls comes with a golden opportunity to convert 4.2 million eligible Floridians into registered voters. But so far, the state’s only plan to reach these citizens is stuck in the last century: snail mail.
As Florida finally joins 29 states in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, it should do more than notify would-be voters by a single postcard, as the partnership requires. State officials should use joining ERIC as an opportunity to reboot Florida’s entire voter registration system and tackle entrenched problems that have long silenced voters.
First, the Florida Legislature must allocate the estimated $1.3 million during the upcoming session to ensure county election supervisors have the resources to urge Floridians to register to vote. Then county officials should use modern tools to reach people where they are — by text, email, and digitally on social platforms — to ensure all Floridians have a voice in our democracy. Legislation passed earlier this year requires supervisors to use text, phone and email to contact voters when problems occur with provisional and mail ballots. Registering voters deserves that same level of effort.
Statewide, county elections officials vary widely in their capacity to offer this necessary communication. Many smaller counties, such as Madison or Lafayette, run by a time-strapped supervisor with little staff support, are already doing their best to carry out necessary tasks of running elections. Meanwhile, larger counties, such as Orange and Broward County, already invest in voter registration drives and innovative outreach such as partnerships with local high schools to train students how to run student government elections just like real polling places on election day.
Many county supervisors want to fulfill the state’s obligation to reach potential voters. They just need the resources to do it right.
Second, Florida officials must ensure the state’s online voter registration system, or OVR, is secure, stable, and free from technical glitches that prevented people from completing registrations last year — on the eve of both the primary and general election deadlines.
According to the Division of Elections, over 140,000 voters registered online during the 2018 election cycle, but that experience was not without problems.
Last October, All Voting is Local and more than 40 voting rights groups urged then-Secretary of State Ken Detzner to extend the voter registration deadline by one week, as Hurricane Michael threatened the Florida coast — just as the OVR site crashed. That letter came after the Secretary of State’s office failed to answer advocates’ public records requests about the security of the online system.
Voting rights groups are still waiting for answers.
The public deserves to know the source of the technical problems, and if or when they will be fixed. Officials owe it to voters to deliver a secure, functional website so that come election season, voters can cast ballots that count.
Lastly, Florida officials should use ERIC to its maximum potential to ensure more accurate voter rolls and eliminate the need for the state to pursue additional list maintenance efforts that could lead to large-scale voter purges, harming mostly people of color, as we have seen in the past. Florida election officials tried to purge thousands of Hispanic voters before the 2014 election and state lawmakers have tried for the past several years to do it again. We can’t allow practices that silence voters at the polls. The state must ensure that voters aren’t needlessly stripped of their right to vote.
Joining ERIC is a start, but now state lawmakers must fully fund voter outreach efforts so that all eligible voters are heard. Until the state embraces policies such as automatic voter registration — which make it easier to register to vote and harder to remove eligible voters — state and local election officials should do everything within their power to get voters on the rolls.
Our democracy works best when all citizens can participate — we owe it to Florida voters to ensure they have every opportunity to do so.
The author is Florida State Director for All Voting is Local, a coalition of national civil rights groups fighting to remove discriminatory barriers to the ballot in states nationwide. He is based in Tallahassee.
