Two Thirds of Provisional Ballots in Florida Rejected
They're better odds than Lotto. Still, if you were one of 27,451 Florida voters forced to cast a provisional ballot in the 2004 election, chances are your vote didn't count. Two-thirds of all provisional ballots submitted in the general election were rejected, according to aTallahassee Democrat analysis of reports provided by the state's 67 county supervisors of elections. Most ballots were thrown out because the voter was not registered in that county. More than 11 percent of the ballots were tossed aside because the voter was in the wrong precinct. Another 7.2 percent were cast out because the voter had been purged from the voting rolls, because either the voter hadn't voted lately or was deemed a felon. Most counties did not separate those two categories, but for the 20 counties that did, purged felons accounted for 4 percent and inactive voters accounted for 7.3 percent. State law requires county supervisors to purge voters from the rolls if they haven't voted in the last two federal elections. The state Division of Elections required states to purge felons who hadn't gotten their civil rights back, but it didn't require them to use a statewide felon purge list. That list was withdrawn after the media discovered it was fraught with errors and didn't include Hispanic felons because of discrepancies in how law-enforcement agencies tabulate data. Provisional ballots were required for the first time nationwide in the 2004 election as a way to give elections officials more time to verify ballots of voters whose eligibility was in question. It would be expected that most voters who don't show up on the voting rolls would be ineligible to vote. Florida was one of 28 states that required voters to be in their proper precinct for their provisional ballot to count. [more]