As states are permitted to design their own registration forms, it is well within the purview of Florida’s government officials – particularly the Secretary of State (SoS) – to design motor vehicle and voter registration forms that comply with Florida law and with our US Constitution. The current situation in Florida is a total mess.
By Roger Stone
In 1993, the ineffably corrupt and/or compromised and/or complicit (or just plain stupid) US Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA)1, containing an intentional provision that could subsequently (and conveniently) be exploited to enable non-citizens to vote. Known as the “Motor-Voter Law,” this regulation requires that each driver license registration must serve as a simultaneous voter registration.
The inherent problem with this is that motor vehicle agencies are not required to verify US citizenship. While that issue could be addressed via state regulations, Florida state officials have been complicit in not taking the necessary steps to plug this cavernous hole.
As states are permitted to design their own registration forms, it is well within the purview of Florida’s government officials – particularly the Secretary of State (SoS) – to design motor vehicle and voter registration forms that comply with Florida law and with our US Constitution.
Pursuant to F.S. 97.052(1), Uniform statewide voter registration application – the law states, “The department shall prescribe by rule a uniform statewide voter registration application for use in this state.” (Emphasis added.)
F.S. 97.052(2) goes on to state:
The uniform statewide voter registration application must be designed to elicit the following information from the applicant…
…(s) Whether the applicant is a citizen of the United States by asking the question “Are you a citizen of the United States of America?” and providing boxes for the applicant to check to indicate whether the applicant is or is not a citizen of the United States.”4
In its hardcopy format, the Florida Voter Registration Form5 (see Figure 1) explicitly asks the question, “Are you a citizen of the United States of America?” and provides the boxes for the individual to check “Yes” or “No.”
Unfortunately, this form is not given to the unsuspecting person applying for, or renewing, a Florida driver license. Instead, the electronic form used by motor vehicle agencies – which serves as the simultaneous voter registration – does NOT ask this mandatory and vital question, as evidenced in Figures 2 and 3 below, from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (DHSMV) Training Manual 6.7.
By the way, you won’t find the current Florida Voter Registration Form on the Florida Department of State (FDoS) website, RegisterToVoteFlorida.gov8 or on the FDoS Division of Elections’ (DoE) publications and forms site9 because the site still has the 2013 version of the form, even though page 2 of the PDF shows a revision date of 9/14/2020.10 There’s a second PDF posted to the DoE’s publications site with a revision date of 04/2022; however, that also has the obsolete nine-year-old form dated 2013.
Figure 1
Motor-Voter Fraud 101 (Rev. 01)Page 1 of 2, 2 of 2.
Motor-Voter Fraud 101 (Rev. 01)Page 3 of 2