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.
When your client is out on bond, the pressure is much lighter to rush to trial … because your client is sitting at home. When your client is sitting at the Seminole County Jail, your client is going to want this resolved.
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| — | Orlando-based former prosecutor Randy McLean • Discussing the George Zimmerman trial. Zimmerman returned to Sanford, Fla. Sunday morning to turn himself in. His bond was revoked Friday on evidence he hid a passport and financial gains received from a Web site he put up in the wake of allegations against him. This constituted evidence that he was a flight risk. As McLean points out, this is a bit of a double-whammy for Zimmerman — as his lawyer waived his right to a speedy trial, meaning that it might be slow-going for the Trayvon Martin shooter as he waits for his trial to begin. (via shortformblog) |
Congressman John Lewis may have described the reason for these concerns best, in a speech on the House floor last summer, when pointing out that the voting rights he worked throughout his life — and nearly gave his life — to ensure are, ‘under attack … [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.’ Not only was he referring to the all-too-common deceptive practices we’ve been fighting for years. He was echoing more recent fears and frustrations about some of the state-level voting law changes we’ve seen this legislative season.
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| — | Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr., quoted in Darkness in the Sunshine State - NYTimes.com (via bohemiansouth) |
From David Firestone, New York Times
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“Florida Republicans have gone so far in trying to tilt the voter rolls to their advantage that two higher powers were forced to step in yesterday to right the balance.
In 2008, registration drives brought thousands of young, black, Hispanic or low-income voters to the polls, many of whom helped President Obama win the state. To prevent that from happening again, the Republican-dominated legislature passed a law last year that could have imposed heavy fines or criminal penalties on volunteers if they accidentally registered an ineligible voter. That put a quick end to the drives.
On Thursday, Federal Judge Robert Hinkle said the limits on voter drives were unworkable, served no legitimate purpose, and appear to violate the National Voter Registration Act. He blocked them until there can be a trial on the issues. The League of Women Voters, which by current Florida standards is a radical band of outlaws, cheered the ruling and vowed to return to the dangerous business of helping people participate in democracy.
State officials, meanwhile, had found another way to reduce the participation of minorities and the poor, who tend to vote Democratic. A few months ago, Gov. Rick Scott expressed deep concern that non-citizens might be poisoning the political system by daring to vote, though there wasn’t the slightest indication that was a widespread problem. To prevent that from happening, he ordered that the voter rolls be checked against driver’s license records to ferret out renegade voters.
That process produced hundreds of errors and drew widespread criticism, but none as effective as the letter that arrived from the Justice Department late yesterday. It said the purge violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which requires the department to pass judgment on all voting changes in certain areas with a history of discrimination against minorities, including parts of Florida. As a result, the department said, the purge was legally unenforceable.
Immediately, county election supervisors across the state (many of whom always hated the idea of a purge) said they would stop trying to scrub the rolls. That left Mr. Scott sounding rather alone, denying any discriminatory intent and saying the state would review the letter from Washington. “We want fair elections,” he said. As long as the right people do the electing.”
OK, a crude calculation:
1. From IRS data, we find that Florida’s tax payments to Washington fell approximately $25 billion between 2007 and 2010, the bottom of the slump.
2. From Labor Department data, we find that in 2010 special unemployment insurance programs — extended benefits paid for from DC — were about $3 billion in 2010.
3. From SNAP (food stamp) data, we see that food benefits to Florida rose about $3 billion over the same period.
So as I read it, between falling tax payments without any corresponding fall in federal benefits, plus safety-net aid — not counting Medicaid, which would make the number even bigger — Florida received what amounted to an annual transfer from Washington of $31 billion plus, or more than 4 percent of state GDP. That’s a transfer, not a loan. And it’s very big.
Oh, and we should also add both FDIC costs and Fannie/Freddie losses in Florida.
Aid on that scale is inconceivable in Europe as currently constituted. That’s a big problem.
Please SIGN and SHARE. It’s an under-reported story, but it has massive implications. Find out more details about the voter purge here.
Great news for anyone who thought, “Sure, disenfranchising veterans is good, but we can do BETTER!”
Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher, a former Democratic state representative, told ThinkProgress in an interview that while the state of Florida sent her county 115 names of voters it considered “sure matches” with a list of non-citizens, her office determined the list’s documentation to be “not credible” and has not sent out letters asking for verification of citizens to any of those voters.
And here’s a reminder of why disputes in Florida over voter eligibility are so important: That election, you’ll recall, was decided by just 537 votes.
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| — | World War II Vet Caught Up In Florida’s Voter Purge Controversy : It’s All Politics : NPR (via tinfoilandtea) |
Dear Rick Scott: If you oppose democracy, you oppose America.
Governor Rick Scott (R) has ordered the state to purge all “non-citizens” from the voting rolls prior to November’s election. But that list compiled by the Scott administration is so riddled with errors that, in Miami-Dade County alone, hundreds of U.S. citizens are being told they are ineligible to vote, ThinkProgress has learned exlusively.
According to data from the Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections obtained by ThinkProgress:
- 1638 people in Miami-Dade County were flagged by the state as “non-citizens” and sent letters informing them that they were ineligible to vote.
- Of that group, 359 people have subsquently provided the county with proof of citizenship.
- Another 26 people were identified as U.S. citizens directly by the county.
- The bulk of the remaining 1200 people have simply not responded yet to a letter sent to them by the Supervisor of Elections.
You can see a similar letter sent to alleged “non-citizens” by the Broward County Supervisor of Elections HERE. (“The Supervisor of Elections… has received information that you are not a citizen of the United States.”) If recipients of the letter do not respond within 30 days — a deadline that is mere days away — they will be summarily removed from the voting rolls. The voters purged from the list, election officials tell ThinkProgress, will inevitably include fully eligible Florida voters.
In short, an excess of 20 percent of the voters flagged as “non-citizens” in Miami-Dade are, in fact, citizens. And the actual number may be much higher.
Poetic justice would be a Dickensian nighttime visit by the Ghosts of Memorial Days Past, with veteran after veteran lining up to explain to Rick Scott that they didn’t die so some vampire freak of a would-be dictator could pick and choose the voters most likely to vote for his party.
Of course, that’s impossible. So I guess I’ll have to settle for Scott being dragged out of the Florida Governor’s Mansion in chains — preferably by his ankles — to the nearest courthouse to answer for treason in this attempted bloodless coup.
Wait, that’s unlikely too? What the fuck kind of country are we running here these days, anyway?
The face of the Southern electorate is changing, and perhaps nowhere is the shift clearer than Florida and North Carolina. In the two critical battleground states, the share of white voters has shrunk since the last presidential election in 2008, and the number of African-American, Latino and other people of color voters has steadily grown.
But while the numbers show key Southern states continue to move towards an increasingly diverse electorate, new voting restrictions could undermine its political potential.
But while the numbers show key Southern states continue to move towards an increasingly diverse electorate, new voting restrictions could undermine its political potential.
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| — | Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies in his article, Latino, black political clout grows in Florida and North Carolina by Chris Kromm | LikeTheDew.com (via likethedew) |
A mayoral candidate in Florida’s Miami-Dade County has launched an investigation to determine why 293 brand new cars and trucks spent five to six years in a parking garage with almost no miles on them.
The Tampa City Council wants Republican Gov. Rick Scott to issue an executive order, preventing people with concealed weapons permits from carrying guns during the GOP convention.
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via: Will protesters at political party conventions be armed? LOL! Oh, the irony…. |
Judge: Gov. Rick Scott’s order to drug test state workers ruled unconstitutional - MiamiHerald.com »
U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro declared that Scott’s executive order to conduct random drug tests of 85,000 state employees amounted to an “unreasonable” search under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. Her decision was based on U.S. Supreme Court precedents that have cited the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches, concluding that governments cannot require job applicants to take drug tests absent a “special need,” such as safety.
Ungaro found that Scott’s order was so broadly worded that it failed to meet any drug-testing searches deemed “reasonable” by the U.S. Supreme Court because of “surpassing safety interests,” such as mandatory urine tests of railroad workers.
“In the present case, the court searches in vain for any similarly compelling need for testing,” Ungaro wrote in a 37-page decision. “The [executive order] does not identify a concrete danger that must be addressed by suspicion-less drug-testing of state employees, and the governor shows no evidence of a drug use problem at the covered agencies.”
Scott’s executive order, issued last year, required random drug testing of current state employees as well as a pre-testing of prospective job applicants in agencies under his control.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees sued the state last June, maintaining that the governor’s order was unconstitutional.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) shocked the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence this week when he vetoed $1.5 million in funding for 30 rape crisis centers in the middle of Sexual Assault Awareness Month. State lawmakers allotted the money to offset an increase in need and a lack of sufficient funding for victim services.
A spokesperson for Scott said he vetoed that particular line item in the state budget because the state already funds sexual violence programs, and nobody was able to make it clear to him why rape crisis centers needed the new funding.
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As for the $6.5 million that Scott said the government provides for rape prevention and sexual assault services, a large percentage of that money is distributed to education programs, not actual crisis centers serving the victims.
“He’s probably including rape prevention and education money,” she said. “You think they would have asked us about that, and we could explain to them very clearly what money is available for our programs. It looks like $1.5 million is a lot of money to ask for, but frankly, when you spread it across 67 counties, it’s not.”
From a political standpoint, Scott’s cuts to sexual violence funding could not have come at a worse time, as Republicans in Congress are taking heat for opposing the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. But Scott’s spokesman said the governor’s decision had nothing to do with the oft-cited GOP “war on women.”
“Anyone who’s trying to say this veto is evidence of a war on women, is deliberately trying to mislead the public for political ends,” Wright said.
