I came across an interesting study that shows the Florida mail-in re-vote plan would feature a heavy bias against African-Americans.
The crux of it is that there is a startlingly high error rate in the addressses in the registration records. Errors that include bad or missing zip codes or missing apartment numbers are detectable, and are twice as likely to affect African-Americans as they are others.
In other words (since voting is involved), the mail-in revote plan isn't just bad, its unconstitutional!
The paper is here, and there is also a link to it here.
The basic numbers are as follows.
11.8% of registered voters are African-American (of both -- or actually, all -- parties, I believe. Data from elsewhere suggest that the number he uses as a baseline in his study is for all parties).
19.1% of addresses that appear to have a missing apartment number belong to African Americans.
25.3% of addresses that have a missing or bad zip code belong to African Americans.
These two detectable errors amount to about 2 percent of the total number of addresses on file. Given that African-Americans are about 20 times more likely to be registered as Democrats as they are Republicans in Florida,* the effect on a Democratic-only party would be far higher. What's more, other errors that would make it difficult to deliver ballots -- mispelled street names, etc. -- are much harder to detect, but are surely there.
The Florida mail-in revote plan may be dead anyway. But should someone try to revive it (and bear with me for mixing metaphors here), it should be Returned to Sender -- just like all those ballots that would face the same fate.
(It's also worth noting that the author, Michael McDonald of George Mason University, is not affiliated with any campaign. He's a political scientist who just might be the country's top expert on voter turnout and the things that affect it. In the interest of full disclosure, I have met him and briefly worked on the same floor as him.)
*Really. According to this page from the Fla. Sec. of State (yes, it's OK to snicker, I think), there were 64,460 black Republicans registered at the end of 2007, versus 1,002,894 black Democrats!