Florida GOP Takes Voter Suppression to a Brazen New Extreme
POSTED:
May 30, 12:34 PM ET |
By Ari Berman
Early voters wait in line to cast their ballots at Jupiter Community Center in Palm Beach County.
Read more:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/florida-gop-takes-voter-supression-to-a-brazen-new-extreme-20120530#ixzz221oxEA3MImagine this: a Republican governor in a crucial battleground state
instructs his secretary of state to purge the voting rolls of hundreds
of thousands of allegedly ineligible voters. The move disenfranchises
thousands of legally registered voters, who happen to be overwhelmingly
black and Hispanic Democrats. The number of voters prevented from
casting a ballot exceeds the margin of victory in the razor-thin
election, which ends up determining the next President of the United
States.
If this scenario sounds familiar, that’s because it happened in
Florida in 2000. And twelve years later, just months before another
presidential election, history is repeating itself.
Back in 2000, 12,000 eligible voters – a number twenty-two times
larger than George W. Bush’s 537 vote triumph over Al Gore – were
wrongly identified as convicted felons and purged from the voting rolls
in Florida, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. African
Americans, who favored Gore over Bush by 86 points, accounted for 11
percent of the state’s electorate but 41 percent of those purged. Jeb
Bush attempted a repeat performance in 2004 to help his brother win
reelection but was forced to back off in the face of a public outcry.
Yet with another close election looming, Florida Republicans have
returned to their voter-scrubbing ways.
The
latest purge comes on the heels of a trio of
new voting restrictions
passed by Florida Republicans last year, disenfranchising 100,000
previously eligible ex-felons who'd been granted the right to vote under
GOP Governor Charlie Crist in 2008; shutting down non-partisan voter
registration drives; and cutting back on early voting. The measures, the
effect of which will be to depress Democratic turnout in November, are
similar to voting curbs passed by Republicans in more than a dozen
states, on the bogus pretext of combating "voter fraud" but with the
very deliberate goal of shaping the electorate to the GOP's advantage
before a single vote has been cast.
Florida Republicans have taken voter suppression to a brazen extreme.
After the 2010 election, Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, instructed
Secretary of State Ken Browning to compile a massive database of alleged
"non-citizen" voters.
Browning resigned in February rather than implement Scott’s plan,
saying "we were not confident enough about the information for this
secretary to hang his hat on it."
But in early May his successor, Kurt Detzner, a former beer-industry
lobbyist, announced a list of 182,000 suspected non-citizens to be
removed from the voting rolls, along with 50,000 apparently dead voters.
(Seven thousand alleged felons had already been
scrubbed from the rolls in the first four months of 2012). On May 8, the state mailed out a first batch of 2,600
letters
to Florida residents informing them, "you are not a United States
citizen; however you are registered to vote." If the recipients do not
reply within thirty days and affirm their U.S. citizenship, they will be
dropped from the voter rolls.
The first batch of names was riddled with inaccuracies. For example, as the progressive blog
Think Progress
noted, "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." If this ratio holds for the rest of the names on the
non-citizens list, more than 35,000 eligible voters could be
disenfranchised. Those alleged non-citizens have already included a
91-year-old
World War II veteran who’s voted since he was 18 and a 60-year-old
kennel owner
who has voted in the state for four decades. It’s impossible to
quantify how many eligible voters will be scrubbed from the rolls if
they’ve moved, aren’t home, don’t have ready access to citizenship
documents, or won’t bother to reply to the menacing letter.
"There are lots of things that can go wrong when you have these
large-scale systematic purges," says Myrna Perez, senior counsel in the
democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "They need to be
done really carefully, with a lot of transparency, well in advance of
the election. And this is too close." Florida Republicans are following
the lead of
GOP secretaries of state
in places like Colorado and New Mexico, who’ve made outlandish and
unsubstantiated claims about non-citizens voting based on sketchy data,
bad methodology, and anti-immigrant sentiment.
The purge has sparked a bipartisan outcry from local election
officials in Florida. "The state’s supervisors of elections are very,
very disturbed," says Ian Sancho, supervisor of elections in Leon
County, which includes the state capital of Tallahassee. "This was
dumped into our laps at the 11
th hour. Those of us who have been here long enough get this eerie similarity to the flawed felon databases of 2000 in Florida."
Adds Deirdre Macnab, president of the Florida League of Women Voters:
"We are very, very concerned about this news because of the track
record in this state of purging thousands of voters who should not have
been purged. We’re deeply troubled and appalled this is happening just
months before a major national election."
As in 2000, the purge disproportionately targets
Democratic voters.
Two-thirds of the alleged non-citizens on the initial purge list reside
in heavily Democratic Miami-Dade County, which supported Obama by 17
points over McCain in 2008. The county had the third highest number of
naturalized citizens from 2009 to 2011, meaning that many new citizens
could very likely be listed as non-citizens in the state databases.
Florida Hispanics, who voted 57 percent for Obama in 2008, are only 13
percent of the state's electorate but make up 58 percent of the
non-citizens list. Whites, by contrast, account for 68 percent of
registered Florida voters but only 13 percent of alleged non-citizens.
Democrats outnumber Republicans on the list by two to one. “Attempts to
purge the voter roll so soon after signing one of the nation’s most
controversial voting laws raises concern, especially among young and
minority voters,” Florida Senator Bill Nelson wrote in a letter to Scott
.
Minority voters also bore the brunt of the voting restrictions passed by
the GOP last year. Hispanic and African-American voters were twice as
likely as white voters to register to vote through non-partisan voter
registration drives run by the likes of Rock the Vote and the League of
Women Voters, which had to suspend their registration efforts in the
state due to new onerous bureaucratic requirements, which threaten to
turn civic-minded volunteers into criminals. As a result, black and
Hispanic voter registration has declined 10 percent in Florida relative
to 2008, according to the
Washington Post, with 81,000 fewer voters registered during a comparable period in ’08, says the
New York Times. African
Americans also made up 54 percent of early voters in 2008; early voting
has subsequently been cut from 14 to 8 days, with no voting on Sunday
before the election, when black churches historically mobilize their
constituents. (The Department of Justice has
objected to the changes under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination against minority voters.)
The registration and early-voting restrictions took effect one day after
the law passed, under an emergency statute designed for "an immediate
danger to the public health, safety or welfare." Like the purge, the
election changes were sold under the banner of "voting integrity," even
though so-called voter fraud cases are virtually non-existent in
Florida, as in the rest of the country. From 2008 to 2011, the Florida
Department of Law Enforcement received just 31 complaints of suspected
voter fraud, resulting in only three arrests statewide. "No one could
give me an example of all this fraud they speak about," said Mike
Fasano, a Republican state senator who opposed the new restrictions.
The state has already pledged that "several thousand" more alleged
non-citizens will be targeted from the purge list. "The state told us
we’re going to get names routinely," says Carolina Lopez, special
project administrator for the Miami-Dade County Board of Elections. The
purge is likely to be challenged by a host of voting rights groups under
the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits changes to the
voter rolls ninety days before an election (Florida holds state and
local primaries on August 14). The Justice Department could also
intervene under the authority of the Voting Rights Act. But, despite
widespread condemnation, there’s no sign that Gov. Scott is preparing to
reverse course.
Following the 2000 election, a major report from the US Commission on
Civil Rights found that "statistical data, reinforced by credible
anecdotal evidence, point to the widespread denial of voting rights [in
Florida]." Ian Sancho, the Leon County elections official, says the
political climate surrounding voting in the state is even "more
hyper-partisan than in 2000," which is hard to fathom. If the
presidential election is once again decided in the Sunshine State,
heaven help us all.
Update - Thursday, May 31: A Florida district court judge today issued
a preliminary injunction
against the state's crackdown on voter registration drives – which
includes fines of up to $1,000 if forms are not turned in to the state
within 48 hours and the threat of felony prosecution – based on a
lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters of Florida, Rock the Vote
and the Florida Public Interest Research Group Education Fund. "When a
plaintiff loses an opportunity to register a voter," wrote Judge Robert
Hinkle, "the opportunity is gone forever." That same principle,
incidentally, should apply to eligible voters wrongly purged of their
right to vote by the state.
Update - Friday, June 1: In another victory for the
cause of voting rights, the Justice Department yesterday told Florida
that it needs to get approval for its voting purge under Section 5 of
the Voting Right Act to make sure it does not discriminate against
minority voters and that the timing of the purge violates the National
Voter Registration Act.
The United States of America is a constitutional democracy.
The U.S. economy slowed in the second quarter.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The Obama administration just can't get rid of Neil Barofsky.
Since Facebook's May 18 debut, the company and its founder Mark Zuckerberg have failed to impress investors.
Caterpillar's CEO is optimistic about future global growth.