Law Blog Swing State Watch: Next Stop — Florida

[WSJ_law_blog]

Let’s head down to Florida where the voting scene is slightly more contentious, but not by much, than Ohio’s.

“Things are going well,” said Hayden Dempsey, a Greenberg Traurig partner and Florida’s statewide chair for Lawyers for McCain. “We’ve seen sporadic but not unexpected glitches with machines, but the reports aren’t clustered in any particular county and there’s not a high incidence.”

Yet, the Republicans in Florida are making an issue out of Democratic lawyers who dole out voting advice despite not being licensed to practice law in Florida. (The NLJ reported on this today.) “The issue is this,” said Dempsey. “All 50 states tightly regulate the practice of law within their state. Florida prohibits out-of-state attorneys coming into this state and practicing law without a license. But what we’re seeing is out-of-state attorneys coming into Florida and holding themselves out as Florida voting rights attorneys on hats and pins.”

Dempsey, who’s stationed in Tallahassee with the McCain Campaign and the Republican Party of Florida, said they’ve received one complaint about a New York lawyer in Orange County who was standing outside a polling station advising Florida voters about Florida law.

Could the issue see litigation? Probably not, says Dempsey. “It’s one of those things where, in all likelihood, it’s probably going to be a violation without a remedy for a voter who relied on erroneous information and was harmed.”

One prominent Democratic lawyer shrugs it off. “If it’s happening it would be isolated and inadvertent,” said Kendall Coffey, the former U.S. Attorney for South Florida who’s stationed at the voting supervisor’s office in Dade County. “Someone can be part of a voter protection team without being a lawyer. Organized labor operatives have been doing it for decades. Discussing basic rights that voters have isn’t necessarily the practice of law.”