Florida Congressman Demands Gov. Rick Scott ‘Immediately Suspend’ Voter Purge

[BrainGlutton]

Flrodia still refuses to stop the purge.

Florida will defy a federal warning to stop purging people the state suspects aren’t U.S. citizens from voter registration rolls.

Despite a Justice Department letter, objections from county elections officials and evidence that a disproportionate number are voters of color, Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner’s office planned to continue scrubbing the election rolls, a spokesman said Friday. Gov. Rick Scott (R) ordered the search for potentially ineligible voters.

“We have an obligation to make sure the voter rolls are accurate and we are going to continue forward and do everything that we can legally do to make sure than ineligible voters cannot vote,” said Chris Cate, a spokesman for Detzner. “We are firmly committed to doing the right thing and preventing ineligible voters from being able to cast a ballot. We are not going to give up our efforts to make sure the voter rolls are accurate."

Justice Department officials declined to comment on Florida’s plans.

[Chronos]

“We have an obligation to make sure the voter rolls are accurate and we are going to continue forward and do everything that we can legally do to make sure than ineligible voters cannot vote,”

OK, I guess that contradicting yourself within the same sentence isn’t exactly uncommon among politicians, but at least have the decency to stick a comma somewhere in between.

[BrainGlutton]

@elucidator

This is a very, very worrisome development. What if Florida flips the DOJ the bird and claims some “state’s rights” justification? The DOJ takes them to court? How long will that take? If Florida insists on proceeding, and the election is held under this cloud, how will we ever sort out who legally won?

The SCOTUS, again? But now it has two Obama appointees on it . . .

[BrainGlutton]

But, the 67 county elections supervisors won’t cooperate with the purge. (And Scott can’t fire them, they’re elected locally.)

[BrainGlutton]

But, the 67 county elections supervisors won’t cooperate with the purge. (And Scott can’t fire them, they’re elected locally.)

TALLAHASSEE — Florida elections supervisors said Friday they will discontinue a state-directed effort to remove names from county voter rolls because they believe the state data is flawed and because the U.S. Department of Justice has said the process violates federal voting laws.

Late Thursday, the Department of Justice sent Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner a letter telling him that an effort launched by Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s administration last year to remove the names of people believed to be non-citizens from voter rolls appears to violate at least two federal voting laws. The federal agency gave Detzner until Wednesday to respond.

The Justice Department letter and mistakes that the 67 county elections supervisors have found in the state list make the scrub undoable, said Martin County Elections Supervisor Vicki Davis, president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections.

“There are just too many variables with this entire process at this time for supervisors to continue,” Davis said.

Ron Labasky, the association’s general counsel, sent a memo to the 67 supervisors Friday telling them to stop processing the list.

“I recommend that Supervisors of Elections cease any further action until the issues raised by the Department of Justice are resolved between the parties or by a Court,” Labasky wrote.

Davis said the effect on supervisors will be “if they’ve started the process and they do find out that someone is ineligible to vote and they have credible and reliable information to back it up, then they will remove that person from the database. But if they have not had contact with someone on the list, they’re stopping at that point.”

[BrainGlutton]

And now, investigative reporter Lee Fang connects the dots back to the Koch Brothers:

The plan for the purge, according to a story from the Associated Press, was initiated last year by then-Secretary of State Kurt Browning after a meeting with the governor. Browning said he was motivated by a “Spidey sense tingling” to undergo a massive project to develop the list now being used to send letters to registered Florida voters informing them that they have been flagged as non-citizens. Although both Gov. Scott and Browning have downplayed accusations that the purge is political, a donation from a secret money group may fuel growing suspicions that the effort is partisan.

Just before Browning was selected in 2011 by Scott as Secretary of State, Browning led a group called “Protect Your Vote Inc,” which was set up to oppose fair redistricting. One of the biggest checks to Browning’s organization came from the Center to Protect Patients’ Rights, which gave $100,000 in 2010. At the time of the donation, the source of the money was shrouded in secrecy. . . .

But as Republic Report exclusively reported last month, the Center to Protect Patients’ Rights is part of a universe of front groups financed by David and Charles Koch, the petrochemical billionaires, as well as several other billionaires, as part of an election-influencing effort. New reports this week about the brothers’ strategy indicate that they will now use this constellation of front groups to finance $400 million of a $1 billion campaign in outside money to defeat President Obama and congressional Democrats. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Mitt Romney’s Super PAC, and several nonprofits controlled by Karl Rove, will furnish the other $600 million.

Browning, who resigned as Secretary of State late last year, also relied heavily on funds from the Republican Party of Florida and the Florida Chamber of Commerce, a big business lobbying group, to support his Protect Your Vote organization, which ultimately failed in blocking redistricting reform. Browning is currently pursuing a bid for local office.

FWIW.

[BrainGlutton]

15 purged voters put back on the rolls by county elections supervisors. The good guys are winning by a nose so far . . .

[What_the]

Is anybody interested in finding a way to “purge” the voter rolls accurately?

[BrainGlutton]

@What_the

Is anybody interested in finding a way to “purge” the voter rolls accurately?

Not any Republican, obviously. It doesn’t actually matter, anyway, until some ineligible person tries to vote, or somebody tries to vote twice by posing as a dead voter, or something. And the instances of either are too vanishingly rare to be any legitimate matter of public concern.

[BrainGlutton]

Lessons and signs of fightback in Wisconsin, anyway.

**Young and Black Voters Turn Out in Wisconsin Despite Suppression Efforts

Brentin Mock on June 6, 2012 - 11:41 AM ET**

It may not feel like there’s anything positive to make out of the unsuccessful bid to recall Governor Scott Walker in yesterday’s Wisconsin elections, but there were hints of optimism. Young voters and African-American voters did more than their part to show up, according to exit polls and early reports, despite significant efforts to confuse and challenge them from groups that profess to be fighting voter fraud.

In Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s seven-point loss to Walker, voters aged 18–29 increased their slice of the electorate from 15 percent in 2010 to 16 percent yesterday. Black voters came out mob-deep. John Nichols, who’s been covering Wisconsin inside-out for The Nation, reported, “Turnout was up dramatically, so much so that on election day election clerks had to be shifted to predominantly African-American wards.”

<snip>

t wasn’t enough to carry the whole state, which mostly went to Walker. One takeaway from this election, though, is that massive grassroots organizing is no longer the exclusive domain of Democrats and their civil rights and labor allies. The right wing has found ways to go mob-deep in its own way, as evidenced by the presence of the Tea Party group True the Vote, a group that wants their “poll observer” activities to make voters feel like the police are following them.

True the Vote traveled all the way from Texas for this Wisconsin bout, stringing along hundreds if not thousands of poll observers from around the country. It’s worth examining how close they are working with the Republican Party.

By about 2 pm, Carolyn Castore, who coordinated an initiative between Wisconsin Election Protection and the state’s League of Women Voters to field voter complaints, said she’d taken about 140 calls, mostly from college students who were challenged on their right to vote. Many of those students were challenged by True the Vote poll watchers, said Castore. (True the Vote mocked those students on Twitter).

College students were hampered by a new voter residency requirement that says a citizen must live in one location for twenty-eight days in order to register to vote. Before the 2011 law went into effect, the requirement was only ten days. Many students graduated in mid-May, went home from campuses to live with their families and thus were affected by the twenty-eight-day rule.

Also, a photo voter ID bill that passed this year, but was blocked by two judges, was not supposed to be in effect. But students complained about being challenged on ID grounds anyway.

All of that was bad enough, but then there were reports of robo-calls to voters’ phones telling them that if they signed the recall petition they didn’t have to vote, which was totally false information. Reid Magney, spokesman for the state’s Government Accountability Board said they received “a significant number” of complaints about these robo-calls, despite numerous media reports that “no big problems” were occurring during elections. State Senator Lena C. Taylor has asked the GAB to launch an investigation into the mysterious calls.

[BrainGlutton]

GOP election supervisor rebukes Scott, won’t go along with the purge.

Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark (R) released a statement Friday saying that her office would not continue the purge:

The accuracy of the voter registration database is of the utmost importance and we will continue our efforts to ensure the information is current. However, we will not use unreliable data.

<snip>

Whitlock noted that Clark and other Florida elections supervisors had questioned “not only the accuracy of the information, but also the timing after learning that the state had the list of voters more than a year prior to distributing it.”

[BrainGlutton]

ACLU files suit over the purge.

In other news, a new poll shows 50% of Floridians disapprove of the purge, and Governor Scott is now less popular than LeBron James.

[elucidator]

And now to the credit where credit is due department: the Florida electoral officials who are telling Scott to stuff it are mostly (entirely?) Republicans. Dare we hope that a spark of sanity still persists? We do dare. Do dare.

[Chronos]

In the extreme case, what avenues of recourse do the Feds have? What if a state just came right out and said “We’re going to remove all registered Whigs from the electoral rolls, so there!”? I’m sure the federal government would do something in that case, but what?

[BrainGlutton]

@Chronos

In the extreme case, what avenues of recourse do the Feds have? What if a state just came right out and said “We’re going to remove all registered Whigs from the electoral rolls, so there!”? I’m sure the federal government would do something in that case, but what?

Seek a federal-court order to reverse it. I’m sure the Voting Rights Act provides federal jurisdiction here.

[BrainGlutton]

Doubling down on the crazy: Now Scott’s suing the Department of Homeland Security.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) said he will sue the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to move forward with his controversial attempt to purge the voter rolls in his state of ineligible voters.

“I have a job to do to defend the right of legitimate voters,” Scott told Fox News on Monday. “We’ve been asking for the Department of Homeland Security’s database, SAVE, for months, and they haven’t given it to us. So this afternoon, we will be filing a lawsuit, the secretary of State of Florida, against the Department of Homeland Security to give us that database. We want to have fair, honest elections in our state and we have been put in a position that we have to sue the federal government to get this information.”

[BrainGlutton]

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is suing Florida to stop the purge.

[ladyfoxfyre]

@BrainGlutton

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is suing Florida to stop the purge.

One of these days I will learn my lesson and stop reading the comments on articles like these…

[BrainGlutton]

Awesome treatment on The Daily Show!

[IntelliQ]

In related news, dead dog gets voter registration form:

http://www2.wsls.com/news/2012/jun/18/bedford-county-dead-dog-receives-voter-registratio-ar-1996759/