This post is written by Estelle Rogers, retired Project Vote legislative director and longtime progressive advocate. Her activities and opinions do not represent or reflect those of Project Vote.
Voter protection activities in Miami-Dade County, Florida, were pretty low key during early voting this year. It could be that election officials had finally learned how to do things right. It could be that too many people had become resigned to leaving the polls without casting a ballot, or worse, are mollified with a provisional ballot that has no chance of being counted. But for whatever reason, it was quiet. So when I received a report about Maria Perez, a brand new citizen who had registered at her naturalization ceremony in October, I eagerly seized upon it. Here was an issue we could sink our teeth into. Maria had registered, and yet when she went to vote, she was turned away by a clerk who said she was not on the rolls. I was determined to find out why.
The registration deadline was extended in Florida this year, making for some confusion and a backlog at the Election Board. Maybe Maria’s recent registration, and the letter acknowledging it, had just been delayed. Could the problem be as simple as a processing delay that would resolve itself in a few days?
And who was registering voters at the naturalization ceremony? In recent years, it’s become increasingly common to catch new Americans at the very moment they become citizens and make them voters at the same time. Government agencies or bipartisan civic organizations set up tables outside, and the applications they collect are sent along to the appropriate elections office. Is that where the glitch occurred in Maria’s case?
After contacting USCIS and suffering through a maze-like phone system that rivals Social Security’s, I found out that registration at the October naturalization ceremony was offered by the Miami-Dade Board of Elections. Timely delivery of the application to the proper office was thus pretty much assured. But the Board’s website indeed indicated that Maria was not a registered voter. It did not indicate why. For that information, you have to call their “Registration Managers.” “Not on the rolls,” it turns out, is not the same as “not in the system.”
The Registration Manager found Maria’s information easily. She had attempted to register at her naturalization ceremony, it was true, but the application was incomplete. She had failed to check box number one on the form. “What is box number one?” I asked. “THE CITIZENSHIP BOX,” she replied. Really? The woman had gleefully bounded out of the ceremony, certificate in hand, and the clerk didn’t bother to remind her to check the citizenship box, nor did she look over the application to make sure it was complete. Maria has waited in vain for the letter welcoming her to our democracy. A different letter was sent, the registration manager told me, but too late for Maria to cure the defect in her registration. In fact, she hadn’t received it when she went to the polls. Regardless, there was nothing that could be done.
Turned away at the polling place, Maria was insistent that she would return and cast a regular ballot when we figured out what the problem was and solved it. She rejected the idea of voting provisionally. Even if the problem, whatever it was, could be corrected in time for her provisional ballot to count, she didn’t want to cast second-class ballot. But this detective story has no happy ending. Maria was not a voter after all. Not this time.
Estelle Rogers was Project Vote’s legislative director from 2009 until her retirement in 2015. Since leaving Project Vote, she has been spending her time on volunteer activities that include working at a food bank, mentoring a high school student, and fundraising for her local museum. She also remains passionate about improving our elections.