Having your vote count is your job
Election Day will be here tomorrow. Literally, no, but time is flying.
Voters have to rely on government agencies getting it right: ensuring mail-in ballots get to voters in time; making sure those ballots get back to election headquarters in time; examining signatures for consistency; opening enough polling places; guaranteeing hack-proof voting.
And this year, as with Florida’s Aug. 18 primaries, voting not only has to be secure, the lingering presence of the coronavirus makes it imperative that casting a ballot in person is safe.
It’s also imperative that South Florida voters do everything in their power to take responsibility for ensuring that their votes count in November. They cannot, and should not, rely on government to do everything -- especially as we see terrible instances of voter suppression across the country, including the Trump administration’s knee-capping of the U.S. Postal Service.
More than 10,000 mail-in ballots were rejected in South Florida alone in the Aug. 18 election.
The most common reason?
The voter’s signature on a mailin ballot or at the polling place did not match the signature on file, according to Monica Skoko Rodriguez, president of the League of Women Voters MiamiDade, part of a venerable nonpartisan organization seeking to ensure free and fair elections. If five, 10, 20 years have elapsed since a resident registered to vote, the signature, indeed, might have changed. A slantier or sloppier cursive should not be the difference between voting and not voting.
Take the time to update it -now. Voters can find the form online, fill it out, then mail it to the Election Department.
“If you haven’t updated your signature, look at what they have on file,” Rodriguez told the Editorial Board. “The Elections Department has a user-friendly website.”
This year, the League’s got its work cut out for it.
“We have evidence that Black and Latino communities have their ballots rejected at a higher rate,” she said. “Vote by mail has a very low rate of rejections. But within those rejections, there is not equity.”
The governor and state Legislature could, of course, play an important role here, and elected leaders should have done so before the 2020 elections. They should now commit to funding the technology available to remove human subjectivity from determining whether a signature is a valid match, Rodriguez said. In addition, it’s time to modify purging policies that drop Floridians from the voting rolls.
It’s obvious that neither will happen before Nov. 3.
Again, the emphasis must be on taking personal responsibility. That includes that voters request a vote-by-mail ballot as soon as possible and return it to the Elections Department as soon as they can make informed choices.
That means taking the time to educate themselves on the issues and the candidates making all those promises. One upside to the pandemic? Candidates forums will be as accessible as one’s laptop computer, just as they were in the run-up to the August primary.
Try vote411.org and votemiami.org, in which the Miami Herald has partnered with the
Knight Foundation, the Miami Foundation and Radical Partners. Both sites provide information specific to where a voter lives, the races on that voter’s ballot, important deadlines and other vital information.
There’s no excuse not to be engaged in this singular exercise in democracy. An informed voter is an empowered voter.