Posted on Sat, Sep. 27, 2008

About 3,200 new voters are in the cross-hairs of Florida's new and controversial ''no-match'' law, which could force them to cast provisional ballots on Election Day if officials can't confirm their identities.

The law, designed to prevent potential election fraud and remove joke names from voter rolls -- ''Ricco Suave'' and ''Joe Blow'' among them -- requires local elections officials to mail letters to anyone whose registration information doesn't match the state's driver's license or Social Security databases.

Only those who registered after Sept. 8 are affected. Since then, 71,000 new Florida voters have registered through Monday, according to Florida's elections division.

Miami-Dade County has now issued about 1,200 no-match letters, Election Supervisor Lester Sola said. Broward County sent out about 84 as of last week, said the election office's public services director, Mary Cooney.

The numbers are changing as new voters are added to the voter rolls through the Oct. 6 registration deadline.

Those who are flagged as a no-match, must provide either a driver's license or Social Security card to their county elections office at least 24 hours before Election Day. Otherwise, they'll have to cast a provisional ballot and bring their documentation to the elections office within two days to make their vote count.

Opponents worry that the law poses needless challenges to voters. The databases that elections officials use can have typographical errors that could call someone's registration into question, and the no-match notice could get lost in the mail, said Mary G. Wilson, national president for the League of Women voters.

''You know what happens: You're out of town, or you get busy and you put your mail aside and don't open it right away. So you may have no idea that there wasn't a match,'' she said.

Wilson said voting this year will be hard enough because turnout is expected to be at 85 percent. She said big counties such as Miami-Dade, which has added more than 100,000 new voters since January, could see long lines. She urged people to consider voting by absentee or early ballot.

The NAACP and the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice had unsuccessfully tried to stop the no-match law, predicting that it could ``disenfranchise tens of thousands.''

As of Monday, the date for which the most-recent data were available, almost 9 percent of new registrations didn't match the state's during a computer check of the state's voter rolls. But state elections and county officials manually checked the registrants' information and added about half of them to the active voter rolls.

Secretary of State Kurt Browning defended the no-match law as a necessity, noting joke and pet names have crept onto the rolls.

''Let's register your cat, a dog, your goldfish,'' Browning said. ``If we don't have the ability to check your goldfish's driver's license, he could vote.''