New lawsuit challenges Florida's voter purge
Chip Somodevilla
Voter advocacy groups plan to file a lawsuit as early as Tuesday challenging Florida's effort to clean the voter rolls of non-citizens. The coalition said their suit is more expansive than the Department of Justice suit and could impact other states' potential efforts to clear voting lists.
The Advancement Project is one of four groups alleging the state of Florida is violating section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race and language. The groups say this lawsuit goes beyond the Department of Justice's lawsuit which challenges Florida's actions because it is taking place within 90 days of an election - a move Justice says is prohibited in the National Voter Registration Act. The latest suit, instead, says Florida's actions are illegal because of discrimination, regardless of how close or far an election is.
"This takes purging to a systematic level that is previously unseen," Penda Hair, co-director of the Advancement Project, said of Florida's efforts.
Hair said her suit, which is to be filed in the 7th Circuit Court in Miami, is based on the large number of Hispanic and African Americans impacted by the voter purge. The suit says 58 percent of people on Florida's list are Latino and 14 percent are African American.
"There's a pattern and that is voters of color are always disproportionally impacted by these schemes," Hair told Hotsheet.
Hair says her suit, which is seeking a preliminary injunction, is moving forward despite the Justice Department's lawsuit because she says the halting of Florida's voter purge in all but two counties is temporary.
Meanwhile, Florida is fighting back. The state is suing the Department of Homeland Security for not providing the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to check the voter rolls, which the state says would be a more reliable database to ensure non-citizens are not registered. Instead, the state is using the Florida Department of Elections and Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles lists, which has been determined to have errors.
By trolling through the lists, Florida identified more than 2,600 potential non-citizens who then had 30 days to respond to a letter proving their citizenship. Forty names have been identified as non-citizens while 514 have proved their citizenship.
Meanwhile, the conservative group Judicial Watch and True the Vote filed suit against the state of Indiana on Friday for failing to maintain voter registration lists.
Tom Fitten, executive Director of Judicial Watch told Hotsheet that Indiana has "more people on the rolls than are eligible to vote."
"These leftist groups have been working hand in glove to inflate the voter roles," Fitton said. "Our goal is to get the rolls cleaned before the elections."
Popular in Politics
- Obama forgets to salute while boarding Marine One Play Video
- Petraeus biographer regrets affair
- IRS' Lerner was asked to resign, refused: GOP Sen. 189 Comments
- Obama prom pictures surface 131 Comments
- GOP Rep.: Obama elected because of Reagan's immigration reforms
- Palin Image: Confident, Secure Play Video
- Is President Obama ending the war on terror? 296 Comments
- Pelosi ties bridge collapse to sequester
Scott and his right-wing buddies originally claimed they had identified as many as 182,000 possible ineligible voters. In fact, they identified 2,700 possible ineligible voters, and at least 20 or 25 percent of THEM have already proved they're eligible...including a World War II veteran! Anyone who believes Scott's "purge" is a legitimate search for ineligible voters believes in the tooth fairy!
afsky1 said, "All these lawsuits are nothing but folks wanting to buy votes for their particular political party..."
------
Rather than a scandal about "buying votes", the more accurate statement is to say well-funded groups sympathetic to the GOP want to kill the legal and proper registrations of voters with whom they disagree politically.
In Tennessee, for example, this is more old-fashioned KKK-terrorism at work-- once again, behind-the-scenes. In other states, it is an effort to keep latino and black voters out of the polling place, even if they are legally entitled to vote.
Want to find voting fraud? Look no further than Shelby County, Tennessee, where someone with access to voter records removed parts of the voting histories of 11,000 qualified and active voters.
In the same state, many voters were wrongfully and arbitrarily deemed "inactive" and dropped from voter rolls. Of those determined inactive, some 35 percent were actually purged from voter rolls.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
Such illegal activities occur when voting authorities have no oversight or accountability, and can happen in almost any state.
As you correctly recognize, voting is an irrevocable right of citizenship. But to claim voting is a "privilege" is a completely different term which implies voting is not a right but only a condition which may be altered or even withdrawn.
Voter purges are manifestly a legal matter because they involve denial of the rights of citizenship, and become a civil rights issue, not merely an issue of privilege.
None claims that voters registered in Minnesota should be able to vote in Mississippi state elections, or the reverse. Likewise, in national elections, what matters is where the voter is registered. Again, the matter at hand is illegal tampering with voter registrations-- not buying voters, but quietly removing their registrations.
When the GOP shouted "Voter fraud" in 2004, it was an announcement, not a substantiated charge, of a campaign to suppress Democratic voter participation-- all in line with the Karl Rove hope of a "permanent Republican majority". Such bogus voter fraud eradication campaigns were consistently unfounded in fact, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at Columbia University.
Apart from fraud by individual voters-- which the Brennan Center said is extremely rare-- there now appears to be a concerted campaign by GOP officials to purge voter rolls nationwide before the 2012 election. Of course, those voters purged will never know until they attempt to vote, which is why every voter should visit the local voter registrar to make sure their names are confirmed-- and obtain that confirmation in writing.
See--
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-gop-war-on-voting-20110830
Nothing like obstructive liberal morons to show us just how much the rights and privileges of US citizenship have been cheapened these last few decades.
Non-citizens DO NOT have the right to a voice in our politics and they don't have the right to vote. In fact, they should not have any constitutional rights as extended to US citizens AT ALL when it comes to the franchise.
These cretinous liberal crybabies should realize the cleansing effort on the part of Florida has nothing to do with discrimination based on language or color. This has to do with CITIZENSHIP. If you're not one, then stay the hell out of our ballot boxes!
Self righteous, greedy, belligerent and intolerant folks like yoirself only want your brand of democracy, which of course isnt democracy at all.
Your kind of paranoid and cowardly behavior is the same kind that wouldn't mind executing sevral innocent people as long as a guilty one didnt get away.
you are a pig