Politics

State's voter rolls shrinking

The trend may seem unlikely considering Florida's growth, but a closer look shows a law is behind it.

By STEVE BOUSQUET, Tallahassee Bureau Chief
Published August 6, 2007

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 TALLAHASSEE - Despite Florida's rapid growth, the number of voters in the state has dropped to its lowest level in three years, a trend that could have an impact in a close, high-turnout presidential election in 2008.

On the surface, it's a stunning contradiction: a shrinking pool of voters in a high-growth state.

The main reason for the dropoff is a state law that requiring that in odd-numbered years, voter rolls be purged of people who have moved but never updated their addresses and those who have skipped two straight statewide elections.

Voters who move and don't respond to mail notices from an elections office are listed as inactive. They can still vote, but they are not counted as registered voters.

An inactive voter who skips two consecutive statewide elections is removed and must re-register to vote.

Since November, more than 63,000 voters in Pinellas County and more than 57,000 in Hillsborough County have been listed as inactive or removed from the rolls. In Pinellas, that's nearly one of every 10 voters who were registered last fall.

The Legislature changed the law in 2005 to limit the ability of election supervisors to keep voters on the rolls, placing more of a burden on voters to act when their voting status changes.

"The voter has to take the initiative to update their address now," said Linda Tanko, an official in the Orange County elections office in Orlando.

Under the old law, elections officials who were notified by the U.S. Postal Service that a voter had moved could update the voter's records and contact the voter at the new address.

The new law requires that election officials send reminders to the voter's old, incorrect address.

"It's inane. It's just crazy," said the state's chief elections official, Secretary of State Kurt Browning. "The whole idea is to keep people on the voter registration roll."

Browning said he would ask lawmakers to change the law back to the way it was before 2005.

Florida today has 10.2-million voters, about 150,000 fewer than were eligible to vote in November. The disappearance of voters from the roll affects Republicans and Democrats about equally. Independent voters drop off less frequently.

The subject of removing nonvoters from the rolls remains a touchy topic in Florida, because of the state's checkered past involving elections.

Lee County in southwest Florida has purged more than 78,000 voters from its rolls since the last statewide election in November. The figure is the most of any county and is nearly a fourth of the heavily Republican county's entire pool of voters.

Supervisor of Elections Sharon Harrington said the number is high because the county had fallen behind in maintaining its list.

"They probably should have been deleted over the past 10 years," Harrington said. "We're getting down to a good, clean database, which is what we needed to do."

Election experts say another reason for disappearing voters is that some of them never were voters in the first place.

So-called motor-voter laws, like one in Florida, make it easy to register to vote in many public places. As a result, experts say, many people register as voters simply to get the card as another form of ID.

Voter registration cards are accepted as proof of residency for everything from applying for a homestead exemption to securing in-state tuition rates in college.

"There's any number of reasons," Harrington said.

In Orlando, Tanko said, elections clerks even have a name for these committed nonvoters: "dead weight."

Elections officials say the voter roll will grow as interest in the 2008 presidential vote builds, and interest groups launch registration drives.

But the list of voters is likely to get smaller before it gets bigger, because some large counties have not completed the required maintenance of their voting lists.

Steve Bousquet can be reached at bousquet@sptimes.com or 850 224-7263.

Vanishing voters

Despite Florida's incessant growth, the total number of registered voters has been dropping steadily since 2004.

Year Republican Democrat Other Total

2004 3,954,492 4,322,376 2,199,569 10,476,437

2005 3,954,304 4,276,512 2,241,102 10,471,918

2006 3,920,201 4,196,608 2,268,797 10,385,606

June '07 3,842,662 4,143,162 2,248,793 10,234,617

Shrinking rolls

As they purge the rolls of nonvoters at different times, some counties have fewer voters today than in the last statewide election in 2006, while other counties have more.

County June '07 Oct. '06 Difference

Pinellas 594,569 617,939 -23,370

Hillsborough 622,923 634,073 -11,150

Pasco 274,305 263,167 +11,138

Hernando 123,425 119,604 +3,821

Orange 509,831 569,145 -59,314

Lee 248,199 326,933 -78,734

Miami-Dade 1,057,895 1,090,053 -32,158

Broward 950,552 923,647 +26,905

Source: Division of Elections

[Last modified August 6, 2007, 12:22:12]