Online voter registration ‘great tool,’ officials say

Most people do just about everything online today. They pay their bills. They make hotel reservations and file their income tax returns.

Now, residents can use their computers to register to vote or change their party affiliation as Florida recently joined 35 other states and the District of Columbia to offer online voter registration.

Central Florida elections officials are lauding the online service as a “great tool” that will encourage more people to sign up to vote and improve the accuracy of voter rolls.

“The online voter registration process has opened the door to a lot of folks who have not previously registered to vote,” said Michael Ertel, Seminole County Supervisor of Elections. “When I first registered to vote back in the late ’80s, I had to take a forward step. I had to go to the supervi-

sor of elections office. Since that time, elections offices have come to the voters.”

He pointed to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the Motor Voter Act, as an example of the government making it easier for citizens to register. The federal law, which went into effect in 1995, requires states to offer residents a chance to register to vote when obtaining or renewing their driver’s licenses or receiving public assistance.

But not everyone is completely happy with Florida’s new online registration system — which can be found at Register toVoteFlorida.gov.

Anna Eskamani, an Orlando Democrat who is running for a seat in the Legislature in 2018, said state officials should have done a better job publicizing the online voter-registration website since it launched Oct. 1.

“There needs to be more promotion, otherwise people do not know about it,” she said. “There has been silence about it from the state.”

Officials with the Florida Department of State sent a press release to news media outlets Sept. 28 about the new website. Ertel said his office has been promoting it through social media.

Even so, Eskamani, a community organizer and an official with Planned Parenthood, praised the online voter-registration system, saying it will increase the number of voters by making it more convenient to register.

“It used to be that voterregistration volunteers would walk through neighborhoods carrying clipboards and filling people’s registration information by hand,” she said. “But now they can bring an iPad.”

Having people typing in their names and other information, rather than writing it on registration forms, is a big plus, said Bill Cowles, Orange County Supervisor of Elections.

“It’s a great tool because we don’t have to interpret their handwriting,” he said. “We don’t have to wonder if that’s a ‘John’ or a ‘Joan.’ ”

Michele Levy, a director with the League of Women Voters of Florida, also praised the new system. But she said her organization questions why it requires voters to provide the date of issuance for their driver’s licenses and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.

In comparison, when registering in person, voters can provide either Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers. But they do not need to supply both.

“Our concern is why you need two forms of identification [for online registration]?” Levy asked.

But Lake County Supervisor of Elections Alan Hays favors requiring those registering in person to provide both their driver’s licenses — or other form of government ID — and their Social Security numbers.

“My thinking is that it should be changed so that everybody would have to provide both,” he said. “We need everything we can to ascertain citizenship before they are registered to vote. We have to protect the integrity of the voting process.”

Hays, who was a state senator at the time, voted in favor of the new system when it passed the Legislature in 2015.

State officials said the online system has multiple safeguards and firewalls to prevent hackers accessing voter roll information.

As of Thursday, 1,075 voters had used the online system in Lake, Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties.

“What this has done is it has created a great opportunity for people to be able to register to vote in the venue that is most comfortable and most convenient for them,” Ertel said.