While Coulter gets let off, 14,000 can't vote

While Ann Coulter's friends in Florida state government let her get away with vote fraud by conveniently waiting until the statute of limitations ran out on the complaint against her before acting on it, a law that took effect just last year barred some 14,000 Floridians from even registering to vote even though they were qualified.

The new law was called a "no match" law. It said a voter's name on a registration form had to be matched with a Social Security or driver's license number. But what the law really did was create bureaucratic nightmares for many who attempted to vote. In fact, that's what it was intended to do. Remember, the Republican-dominated Florida legislature is the crew of crackpots that planned on awarding the state's electoral votes to Bush in 2000 if Gore officially won the recount, and created some of the most mind-boggling gerrymanders ever seen to "elect" Republican cronies to Congress and oust Democratic incumbents. So Florida lawmakers ain't exactly champions of uncorrupted electoral politics.

Here's an example of how the "no match" law worked: The Miami Herald reports about an engineering student from Florida named Jose Lopez-Sandin who tried registering to vote. Florida election officials rejected his application because his Social Security number belongs to a guy named Jose Lopez-Sandin. So why would they reject the form because his Social Security number is that of himself, who has the same name as himself? Because the smartypants election officials who took his election form typed his first name as Joseph rather than Jose - which ensured it would be rejected for having a different name than that on his Social Security records.

This isn't even the only error like this. Some of the voter applications that were rejected before last year's election still haven't been cleared up over a year later. If your form is rejected, you're supposed to get a letter informing you of this so you can clear it up. But many people were never sent a letter.

Finally, voters became fed up enough with this incompetence and deliberate bungling that they sued over the new law. Now a federal judge has ordered Florida to stop enforcing this law. The court said the law has resulted in "actual harm to real individuals" and that this statute violates federal voting rights laws.

But it's too late to stem the damage that's already happened because so many folks in Florida were denied their right to vote last year. After Ann Coulter had voted in the wrong precinct, 14,000 eligible voters couldn't even vote in the right precinct. That's the Florida GOPstapo's idea of "fair."

(Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breaking_news/story/349183.html;
http://www.miamiherald.com/top_stories/v-print/story/341350.html)