RNC, Florida GOP move to intervene in challenge to ‘exact match’ voter registration law

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The Republican National Committee (RNC) and Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) have filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit over a state law requiring that a voter’s name and Social Security number match the info on their government ID.

Civil rights groups, collectively represented by nonprofit plaintiff Florida Rising Together, sued Secretary of State Cord Byrd, Attorney General Ashley Moody and Supervisors of Elections in Broward, Duval, Miami-Dade and Orange counties last month.

In their suit, they alleged that more than 43,000 people in Florida have been denied their right to vote since 2018 because the identifying information they used to register was not an exact match for information on a state or federal database.

But according to the RNC and RPOF’s motion Wednesday, upending the rule “will result in more ineligible voters being added to and remaining on Florida’s voter rolls, which impairs … accurate registration lists.”

“The voter registration matching law is a commonsense election safeguard that protects against fraud,” RNC Chair Michael Whatley said in a statement.

“Election officials should confirm that the person registering is who they claim to be, plain and simple. In attacking this protection, Democrats have once again proven they want an election system that makes it easier to cheat.”

The motion to intervene said that changing enforcement of the “exact match” requirement “on the eve of the election inhibits the State’s obligation to ‘ensure that voter registration records … are accurate and are updated regularly,’ which includes a ‘reasonable effort to remove registrants who are ineligible to vote.’”

Of note, Florida Rising Together — represented by the Advancement Project, Community Justice Project, Dechert LLP law firm and Mark Dorosin, a professor at Florida A&M University — did not seek an emergency injunction, meaning the case’s outcome wasn’t likely to affect the Nov. 5 election.

Nevertheless, an RNC press note Friday said the intervention is meant “to uphold the law as we are committed to election integrity in Florida and across the country for our most important election.”

The plaintiffs argue the “exact match” requirement violates their First and 14th Amendment rights, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. They noted a similar law was shot down in a 2018 Georgia court verdict and that such measures disproportionately affect Black voters.

Five years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court killed a key Voting Rights Act provision that until then required states with histories of racial discrimination to first gain federal approval of voting measures before applying them.

“Exact match” laws that then followed have created unnecessary and discriminatory barriers for minority voters, Advancement Project Executive Judith Browne Dianis said last month, according to WSUF.

“A typo should not stand in the way of a citizen’s right to vote,” she said. “Typos, transposing numbers and the inability for those who input data to read what may be imperfect handwriting should not stop people from being able to vote.”

Whatley said the challenge is nothing more than an attempt by “leftist groups” to flout simple safeguards.

“We are defending the law to uphold election integrity in Florida,” he said.