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Designed to make registration easier, the program resulted in hundreds, maybe thousands, of voters being shut out of polls.
By SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 25, 2001
Eighteen months before the presidential election, there were signs of a meltdown in motor-voter registrations, the program that allows people to register while getting a driver's license.
Applications were missing or improperly completed. Others were impossible to read or went undelivered to local elections offices for weeks.
Yet a review of records shows that Florida did little to fix systematic glitches until four months before the election.
And those efforts may have made things worse.
On Nov. 7, hundreds, if not thousands, of would-be voters who thought they were registered said they were turned away from the polls because of an array of mix-ups, including unprocessed motor-voter applications and names that didn't appear on voter rolls.
No one knows how many people were disenfranchised, and state officials have done little to find out.
Sandra Lambert, the state's top driver's license official responsible for motor voter, insists that most of the problems were caught and corrected before the election. She dismisses the notion that delays in processing motor-voter applications kept people from voting.
"We're doing an extremely good job," she said.
But statistics show that the number of people who registered by motor voter dropped in some counties before the Oct. 10 registration cutoff.
"Something is not right here," said Adora Obi Nweze, Florida president of the NAACP.
"It's so interesting that all these things seemed to have happened in time to impact the whole election process," she said. "All of a sudden, everything seemed to be problematic to us."
The motor-voter law, which took effect in 1995, was designed to boost voter participation by allowing people to register at motor vehicle agencies, libraries or other public offices.
From the start, conservatives feared -- and liberals hoped -- motor voter would be a boon to Democrats.
Oversight of Florida's program fell to Lambert, a Republican who has worked for the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles since 1981 and became director of the driver's license division in 1995.
While voter registration increased as motor voter was implemented, the new law also created headaches for county elections officials.
When would-be voters applied at driver's license offices, applications sometimes didn't arrive at elections offices.
Officials blamed some of the glitches on the mechanics of getting forms from office to office. Most applications went through the mail, and some evidently got lost en route or were never sent to the elections supervisor.
Other bungling was caused by inexperienced driver's license staff and lax oversight.
"They (the motor vehicle department) had this laid in their laps," said Pinellas Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark. "I don't think some of the (driver's license) staff was very enthusiastic about taking on new job responsibilities."
Some elections supervisors smoothed over glitches by hiring couriers to pick up applications instead of waiting for them to be mailed.
For other supervisors, though, the problems didn't go away. Outrage over the system helped prompt the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to conduct a satisfaction survey in late winter 1999. Some supervisors were positive, but others cited a pattern of problems.
In Duval County, elections officials reported that delays in the delivery of voter registration applications kept people from casting ballots in a 1999 special election. In Leon County, motor-voter applications were missing.
In Monroe County, one motor vehicle office was mailing applications to the local supervisor of elections every 10 days, despite rules requiring that forms be delivered within five days.
In Santa Rosa County, up to 15 percent of the applications from motor vehicle offices couldn't be legally processed because they lacked signatures.
Other counties had applications arrive from the motor vehicle department without valid addresses. Some were printed crooked or with dark lines or black spots blotting out mandatory information. Some motor-voter employees failed to ask voters whether they had a felony conviction or were American citizens.
"We've been greatly concerned about the lack of applications coming," an Orange County elections official wrote in response to the survey. "It strikes us as odd that they can go for days and have no applications."
Neither the department nor the Division of Elections, under the leadership of Secretary of State Katherine Harris, did much to correct the flaws.
Harris recently testified at a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hearing that she delegated many decisions to her staff. They said they referred motor-voter complaints to the driver's license people, who said, in turn, that they had worked with the local supervisors to resolve the problems.
Even before the election, the buck-passing infuriated Santa Rosa County Elections Supervisor Doug Wilkes. In July 2000, Wilkes, a Republican, wrote a scathing letter to Clay Roberts, Harris' top lieutenant. He called motor-voter foul-ups "totally unacceptable" and Florida's response a "rosy obliteration of a serious problem."
Prompted by the complaint, the department beefed up its training of motor-vehicle staff. It decided to install new computer printers and upgrade software to improve efficiency.
In a July 2000 memo, Lambert estimated the new printers would take three or four months to install.
"My main concern is that we do not delay in our deliveries of the applications to the supervisors of elections," she wrote.
Yet in some counties, the new printers seemed to swell problems. Printers would sometimes lose their settings, rendering registration forms unreadable.
"The examiner was responsible for resetting the printer and printing (the application) over again," Lambert said, adding that "occasionally there would be one or two applications" that didn't arrive at elections offices.
Complicating matters, there were problems with paper supplies.
"During the time they were programming (the new printers), registration data was collected manually," explained Ed Kast, the Division of Elections official responsible for motor voter.
But records show that at least one office didn't have the right forms to complete registration applications by hand.
"The closer you get to an election, the more people complain," Kast said.
Lambert said the new printing equipment made things better, not worse.
State officials couldn't provide exact numbers of complaints. On the Friday before the election, the sign outside one driver's license office in Okaloosa County urged people to hurry in and register so they could vote Tuesday, said Okaloosa County Elections Supervisor Patricia Hollarn. That promise ignored state law requiring all voters to register 30 days before an election.
In Miami-Dade, elections officials fielded calls from dozens of people who said they had yet to receive their voter ID cards after registering through the department. Motor-voter applications soared in Miami-Dade as the election approached.
Elsewhere, however, the numbers defied conventional wisdom by actually dropping as compared to four years earlier, when there was also a presidential race on the ballot. In heavily Democratic Broward County, for example, the numbers of motor-voter registrations fell from 4,842 in July 1996 to 2,540 in July 2000; from 4,069 in August 1996 to 2,571 in August 2000; from 5,569 in September 1996 to 2,691 in September 2000, and from 5,083 in October 1996 to 3,015 in October 2000.
Officials say the decrease simply suggests that more people registered in 2000 through on-line processes or through civic groups that collected applications and turned them in directly to elections offices.
Lambert said there was no connection between declines in motor-voter registrations and printer and application-form glitches.
Kast, the state elections official, added that he was unaware of any delays getting applications from motor vehicle offices to elections offices.
"We don't see any indication of a major holdback," he said.