The voter ID laws and other tactics that sprang up in several states last year to prevent minorities from casting their ballots offer incontestable proof of the need for strict voting rights laws.
And in this case the decision to follow the strict Florida absentee balloting rules, as opposed to the looser Federal ones, was set by the Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris.
While the state had virtually no evidence of people fraudulently posing as someone else to cast ballots, the strict photo ID would prevent or discourage hundreds of thousands of legal voters from casting ballots, she said.
But they are now leaping aboard the democracy bandwagon, alarming those who believe that religious radicals are seeking to put in place strict Islamic law through ballots.
The day began with lawyers for the Republican Party asking a circuit court judge to force the canvassing board to set strict standards for counting ballots that contained chads, the now well-known tiny pieces of paper left after a hole is punched in a paper voting card.
Last week, the House passed a resolution on a strict party-line vote that would place a constitutional amendment on the ballot demanding documentary requirements to vote.
To reduce the opportunity for Republican chicanery, the law should state clearly that the issue must appear at the top of the ballot, and impose strict criminal penalties on State officials for hiding or making it anything but clear and unambiguous where the voter makes his preference known on the ballot.
He demanded that a court reporter be assigned to every team of counters, and said the court should use a very strict standard in interpreting dimpled ballots.
Coleman's lawyers have contended that the court's requirement of strict legal standards to admit ballots is a violation of the 14th Amendment's guarantee of due process, due to the way counties were lenient in various ways when it came to certain requirements, and in turn that the variation in the counties' leniency amounted to to a violation of equal protection.
Florida voter-fraud law places strict rules on how absentee ballots can be obtained, and in 1998 the state elections office ruled that while it was fine for political parties to mail out and even collect absentee applications, voters or their close relatives or guardian must provide their voter registration number.
