Voter Record Error Draws Resident's Concern

Tricia Ritter hopes she won't be turned away when she goes to cast her primary vote Tuesday. 

The 28-year Dunedin resident said her confidence is shaken after her voting record randomly turned up in St. Lucie County, especially since it came around the same time that the Department of Justice threatened to sue Florida unless it halted a controversial non-citizen voter purge.

"With everything going on, how do we know this isn't happening to a lot of people? ... It happened to me out of the clear blue," Ritter said.

Ritter said she became worried when she did not receive her voter registration card a week after her daughter and husband had already received theirs in the mail. When she began calling around to get the matter straightened out, she learned she was registered in some place she had never even visted.

"It's just very odd," Ritter said.

The Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections office told Ritter she was not a part Florida voter purge, but that her address had been changed to a street in Fort Pierce, which is on Florida's Atlantic coast near Port St. Lucie.

Ritter, a registered Democrat and former co-captain for the Barack Obama campaign phone banks, maintains that she is a U.S. citizen, born in Ohio and has lived on Beltrees Street in Dunedin for the past 28 years. She said the last time she visited the DMV was five years ago, and it was to get a blue disability tag for her vehicle. 

"I just don't understand what happened," Ritter said.

Nancy Whitlock, elections administrator for Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark, said that Ritter's voter record was "mistakenly merged with another record by another county" in February 2011. 

"When Ms. Ritter notified our staff that she did not receive her voter information card, our staff checked her voter file, discovered the error and changed her address back to Dunedin," Whitlock said. "She is currently an active voter on our Pinellas County voter file."

Deborah Clark ordered her staff to stop its voter verification process on June 1 because . 

Five out of 36 names that Clark's office checked were legal voters, Clark said in June. Federal law forbids any voter registration list maintenance within 90 days before a national election, according to the Supervisor of Elections.

The early catch allowed Ritter time to re-register in time for the primary, but she wants to be sure people remember to check their voter registration status before the deadline for the national election. 

"I want to make sure everybody has their same (voting) rights," she said. 

Editor's Note: A voter may check his or her voter registration status online.