Commissioners of the United States Election Assistance Commission

Jenny Nash is the spokesperson for Glenda Hood, who is Florida's Secretary of State and its chief elections officer. Ms. Nash's August 30, 2004, phone interview with Etopia Media Voting News can be found below.

Last Thursday, Secretary Hood sent a letter to Buster Soares, the Chairman of the Election Assistance Commission.

In that letter, Ms. Hood says that her office had "become aware of reports of individuals registering and voting in the State of Florida and another state in the same election." Since such double registering or voting in the same election twice is illegal under federal law, the Secretary goes on to say that "I am requesting the assistance of the United States Election Assistance Commission ("EAC") to explore any measures that can be taken both in the short-term and the long-term to put an end to this illegal practice."

Katherine Harris' successor as chief elections official for the Sunshine State continued:

"We steadfastly believe that immediate and decisive action on the federal level is necessary to prevent this type of abuse."

Etopia Media Voting News contacted the Election Assistance Commission in Washington, D.C., today, to see if any "immediate and decisive action" in this area was being contemplated by the independent agency created in 2002 by the "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA).

Asked about the problem of double-voting "snowbirds" and the urgent letter from Florida's Secretary of State asking for federal assistance on a quintessential federal issue, the EAC spokesman said he would "check on that."

To read the same news article that Ms. Nash says made the Florida Secretary of State's office "aware of reports of individuals registering and voting in the State of Florida and another state in the same election," click on this title: "Thousands illegally register in both New York City and Florida," by Russ Buettner, originally published in the New York Daily News on Wednesday, August 25, 2004, the day before Secretary Hood wrote to Chairman Soares.

To hear Secretary Hood's spokesperson Jenny Nash discuss the whole issue of double-registering and double-voting "snowbirds," click here.

Section 303 (a) (1)(A) of the HAVA says that "each State, acting through the chief State election official, shall implement, in a uniform and nondiscriminatory manner, a single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list defined, maintained, and administered at the State level that contains the name and registration information of every legally registered voter in the State and assigns a unique identifier to each legally registered voter in the State (in this subsection referred to as the 'computerized list').

While universal, multi-state compliance with this requirement might make cross-state registration and voting checks easier (depending on the compatibility of the 50+ systems) there is no requirement in HAVA for a National Voter Registration Database, which might be able to more easily detect and eliminate the type of election fraud evidenced in the Snowbirdgate scandal than would be possible using 50 or more separate systems, just as the single state systems required by HAVA can do this for multiple-jurisdiction multiple registration.

The Department of Homeland Security is spending billions of dollars to create massive biometrically-oriented databases to identify and monitor the behavior of non-U.S. citizens entering and leaving the United States. Using that same technology to identify and monitor U.S. citizens, for purposes of preventing double voter registration and voting, is more problematic, since it would be equivalent to creating the "national identify card" so loathed by many critics of it.

In California, debate has flared up once again about the issuance of driver licenses and state identification cards to undocumented immigrants. It is precisely their "undocumented" status which is at issue. Whether, and how, to document them brings up some of the same issues involved with double voting: who should know who we are, and how? As technology evolves and globalization continues and issues of identity rise to the forefront, the challenges manifesting themselves in Snowbirdgate will only become more important and perhaps more difficult to resolve. Attention paid to them now could pay dividends in reduced aggravation and cost later.