No matter what happens on November 5th, I can already tell you that Florida's vote count will be an inaccurate reflection of its people.

I just got off the phone with the sister of Brian Lawson, who turned 18 last February. Based on past election in Florida, Brian was skeptical that his vote would be counted, so she had to work hard to convince him that he should take the time to register himself. Finally, in early September, he did.

Then, on October 7, one day after the voter registration deadline had passed, he received a notification from his county election supervisor that his voter application was incomplete because he had failed to check the box that says:

"I affirm that I have not been adjudicated mentally incapacitated with respect to voting, or if I have, my right to vote has been restored."

Brian's discouraged, but he's not crazy. He called his local elections office, asking to correct his form, but was told it was too late for him to come in and check the box, even though the election was still weeks away.

According to Florida law, Brian would have had to complete his application by checking that box prior to the closing of the registration books on October 6 - yet the notification telling him he needed to do so wasn't postmarked until, you guessed it, October 6.

Under Florida law, the person who accepted Brian's registration form (and who failed to tell him it was incomplete) had 10 days to turn it in. Then, the state has 13 days to enter it into its system and another 5 days to process notifications of incomplete applications. That adds up to 28 days, or four weeks, which in Brian's case was how long it took before he knew there was a problem with his registration form.

In 2004, more than 14,000 registrations were rejected for being incomplete, such as missing a check box like Brian did. That's 14,000 votes not counted, making our election results an incomplete expression of the will of the people. For this and other reasons, out of 830,157 applications received between January 2006 and September 2007, 76,000 did not result in a new registration.

Some of those may have been duplicates, others erroneous applications. But in Brian's case, and thousands of others, it was simply denying a red-blooded tax-paying American the right to vote because a bureaucrat wouldn't let him check a box.