Republican Governor Rick Scott is restarting his high-profile purge of suspected noncitizens from Florida’s voting rolls in a move to appeal to core supporters that risks losing the backing of key swaths of the electorate.
Scott, seizing on the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of a main element of the Voting Rights Act, has revived one of his administration’s most contentious missions: rooting out noncitizens from Florida’s list of 11.8 million voters.
While the move to fight fraud may burnish Scott’s appeal to Republicans, strategists say, it risks reviving memories of polling-place snafus in 2012 and alienating the state’s growing Hispanic population. The purge, which began before the 2012 election, stalled when several U.S. citizens were targeted and a Latino-advocacy group sued, claiming discrimination.
He’s already facing a political backlash as opponents use the opening for attacks. The purge effort was rejected by the state’s elections supervisors last year after several eligible voters were targeted just weeks before the November election.
Last year’s review, which began with about 180,000 names of suspected noncitizens who were registered to vote, was quickly reduced because of errors, first to 2,600 and then to about 200. In the end, just one person, a Canadian, was prosecuted for fraud as a result of the drive, said Gretl Plessinger, a state Law Enforcement Department spokeswoman.
Though Scott rarely answers questions about politics, he is aware how the voter-fraud issue plays among his core supporters. Last year, during the height of the debate over the purge, Scott and Florida’s Republican Party actively promoted the effort, at one point using it for fundraising. Through a private e-mail address listed on Tea Party websites last year, the governor received hundreds of messages from supporters who told him to stand strong in his fight against voter fraud.
State party Chairman Lenny Curry declined to comment yesterday through a spokeswoman.
There’s nothing wrong with cleaning up voter rolls. We’d be spared a lot of ridiculous media accounts of dead people voting if states worked harder on that but it’s an ordinary, boring state administrative process not a political tactic and one has to be competent and trustworthy. As we learned the last time he tried to run an election, Scott is neither. His own county election supervisors rebelled at the last purge, both Republicans and Democrats.
The one and only reason Pennsylvania’s crazed rush to suppress votes failed to pass court review last year was because conservatives screwed it up. It was a mess. They were sending voters all over hell to get documents, and then when they finally got a decision halting the huge, looming clusterfuck that was about to happen poll workers kept asking for ID that wasn’t required.
It’s time to start asking why conservatives can’t run elections. It’s a core state duty and they seem to be incapable of doing it properly.
Also, can we all stop pretending they are “reaching out” to people they’ve alienated? They’re not. Obviously.
Southern Beale
This is OT but this video clip of “Australia’s Sarah Palin” makes the actual Sarah Palin look like a fucking scholar.
Betty Cracker
I certainly hope it won’t go well for Scott, but it’s a gamble he’s got to take, seeing as how he’s polling lower than chlamydia. He doesn’t have to actually find any fraud: All he has to do is make it hard enough for eligible likely Democratic voters to prove their eligibility that they’ll say, awfuckit, and he wins by suppressing the vote. In an off-year election that he’s going to lose barring a miracle, it’s probably worth a shot.
Betty Cracker
@Southern Beale: Gyad. Oh well, she’s only 27, so if she starts reading “all” newspapers right now, she can aspire to being as smart as a bag of hammers in her middle age.
Violet
I love this Republicans outreach to Latinos, women and minorities in general.
The Ancient Randonneur
I think what chaps my ass the most about this sort of voter purge is that in many parts of the United States people with Hispanic surnames can proudly state that their ancestors arrived here in the New World LONG BEFORE many so-called “real Americans”! Several years ago a man from New Mexico (You know, one of the 50 states!), who happened to have a Hispanic surname won the Powerball. In the comments section of a news article about the lucky fellow several people made remarks about how it must be nice that someone who probably came here illegally could win the lottery. Sadly, these ignorant people don’t really know the history of this country. But why educate yourself when you can watch Fox News get all the “history” and “news” you need to continue to be an ignorant, half-bright atavist.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I think it will backfire. He’s not going to be able to substantively reduce turnout, and the politics are horrible. One of my favorite moments of 2012 was when that Twitter picture made the rounds, of the GOP supervisor and some kindly old man Latino who was wrongly disenfranchised. It just makes them look both venal and incompetent.I don’t know how they break out of this. They’ve convinced the base that fraud is rampant, and it isn’t.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: From your lips to God’s ears. And there is precedent: They tried this to swing the state to Romney and failed last year.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
This is who we’re running for Sec of State. Sherrod Brown is doing fundraising appeals for her (he was a Sec of State) and people here really liked her when she came out to see them.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I’m such a sap. I was getting all weepy looking at the voting lines in FL on my phone election day.
“They are so BRAVE” :)
Svensker
@Kay:
One of my wingnut FB rellies assured me that Obama stole the election by having thousands of dead black people vote. When I suggested this was kind of impossible, he told me I was totally naive, not to mention probably stupid.
burnspbesq
If rumors of the demise of BigLaw are well-founded, the Voting Rights Section at DOJ should be fishing in a deep and well-stocked applicant pool.
Kay
@Svensker:
It’s really nutty. They had this thing going here where they said more people had voted in Wood County OH than lived in Wood Co. Wood is the swing county in NW Ohio, so politicos watch it. It’s locally famous. Now, that’s easy to check. They are actually familiar with Wood County, because it’s not far away. They were just accepting these ridiculous vote total numbers. The GOP county elections supervisor had to make a statement.
cleek
@The Ancient Randonneur:
this is the great paradox of the internet: it exposes you to people from around the country and around the world – the potential for a huge variety of different viewpoints and ideas to think about and explore. but, it turns out that most of the people in the world are ignorant, angry and bigoted. so you were probably better off not going on the internet at all.
Yatsuno
Because they don’t want elections. They want their power brokers to enjoy their ruling sinecures for as long as they want the privilege or until nothing is left for the rich overlords to loot from the populace. So it’s just easier to not muck with this messy democracy process and just prove to the rubes it doesn’t work anyway.
g
With them, incompetence isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
Amir Khalid
@Southern Beale:
I notice Stephanie Banister’s from the One Nation party, which was founded by legendary Aussie right-wing nut job Pauline Hanson. Hanson drew international press coverage and was a major embarrassment to her country, especially with the Asian countries to the north. Hanson was also plenty racist, towards non-Anglo (especially non-white) immigrants and Aboriginal (native) Australians alike, but I don’t remember her being this hilariously ignorant.
Davis X. Machina
@Kay:
Luckily, the base is impervious to evidence, and unreachable by argument.
Chris
It’s remarkable how much I don’t like conservatives.
Davis X. Machina
@The Ancient Randonneur: They get mixed reviews, but I’ll always give the American Girls props for teaching a little history. Their Josefina Montoya character lives in Santa Fe in 1824, long before Mr. President Polk’s excellent adventure….
Frankensteinbeck
@Davis X. Machina:
The base WANTS there to be fraud. They’re also even less democratic than their leaders. This is the two year old yelling ‘You cheated!’ every time they lose. It’s a gut thing. The truthiness is that a white male Christianist Republican will win every fair election.
NonyNony
@Kay:
It’s because Wood County is notoriously full of college students, who everyone knows are liberal Commies out to stuff ballot boxes with the the votes of dead people. So it’s totally believable that the College Democrats at BGSU would stuff the ballot boxes.
Truthiness!
Anton Sirius
“…it turns out that most of the people in the world who post on online newspaper comment sections are ignorant, angry and bigoted.”
FTFY, cleek
feebog
As a long time poll worker (in California) I just don’t see how “voter fraud” in the form of an imposter voting for a legitimate voter is supposed to work. In California, the voter is required to give both his/her name and address to the clerk. Assuming that the clerk does not personally know the voter, and assuming that the real voter has not yet voted, the imposter could, theoretically, get a ballot and vote. But the problem goes even deeper. In California, about half the voters get absentee ballots. In order to vote in person, you have to surrender your absentee ballot if the record shows you received one. How is the imposter to know who gets an absentee ballot? And assuming that the imposter gets away with it, all holy hell is going to break out if and when the actual voter shows up to vote. It is going to go right up the chain of command on election day. If this type of fraud was rampant, poll workers would certainly be aware of it. Never has happened as far as I know.
RepubAnon
@Violet: Yes, the Republican outreach program is a smashing success – for Democrats. I’d say we need to do a “what they say versus what they do” series of billboards. Start with “what they say is that they believe in the will of the voters – what they do is discourage qualified people from voting.”
Dave Anderson
Speaking as a professional data geek, combining data from multiple lists that have known disparate formatting systems, known variety of data entry standards, unknown standards of data hygiene and unknown data integrity rules, this is a monster of a task to do right.
My guess is if Florida wants to do it fast, easy and cheap without regard to accuracy, they’ll try to do name matches and perhaps address matching. This will be a cluster fuck with massive false positives (a feature, not a bug in Scott’s eyes).
If one wants to actually do this right, assume $5 per name on the master list to validate and a lot of time. For some reason, I don’t think Florida will spend $60 million dollars on validating their voter rolls and conducting approproriate follow-up and manual checks.
Ruckus
@Dave Anderson:
Of course they won’t. Because they know that the issue has nothing to do with voter fraud, it has everything to do with political fraud.
retr2327
“There’s nothing wrong with cleaning up voter rolls. We’d be spared a lot of ridiculous media accounts of dead people voting if states worked harder on that”
Dave Anderson, above, has pointed out some of the pitfalls in this, but I question whether there’s any upside at all to cleaning voter rolls of dead people. It seems to me there are two categories of possible error here: 1) a live voter listed as dead; or 2) a dead voter still on the rolls as a live voter. The answer to the first category is to stop trying to keep track of who’s dead at all: if they’re really dead, they won’t vote, and if they’re not, you shouldn’t list them as such.
And the second category is even less of a problem . . .
The way to stop stupid stories about “dead” voters voting is to expose them as what they are: stupid stories and myths.
Seanly
@Southern Beale:
Oh, the stupid is strong with her. The newscasters dance around calling her an idiot. At least if you’re going to be so full of hatred for others, get educated as to the facts – oh, wait, that might cause you to see that you’re wrong…
To quote Grampa Simpson: “You, President? This is the greatest country in the world. We’ve got a whole system set up to prevent people like you from ever becoming president. Quit your daydreaming, melonhead!”
Hal
Am I comprehending this correctly? Scott’s effort last time went from 180,000 suspects to just 200? How can you legally justify a voter purging effort that seems far more likely to target legal voters?
Also, damn the conservatives on this Supreme Court.
NonyNony
@feebog:
This is why the most common claims of fraud thrown out by conservatives are about voter registration fraud, not actual vote fraud. Fake people on the rolls means that poll workers won’t get suspicious.
The fact that the logistics of having an enormous number of people come in and pretend to be multiple other people without anyone finding out or spilling the beans would require a conspiracy larger than just about any conspiracy theory I’ve ever heard of is missed in all of this, intentionally. (Historic uses of dead people on the voting rolls has always been about the people counting the votes adding extra votes – which is why the vote counting process has become more transparent. Not about people actually showing up pretending to be the dead people and voting in their name – the number of people you would need to have to pull that off makes it too risky to even try.)
gene108
@NonyNony:
I remember hearing something about vote totals not tallying with the total voters in swing counties in Ohio in 2004. The then going theory was that the new computerized voting machines had been hacked and the tallies changed to allow a Bush, Jr. victory.
In all the hysteria about voter fraud, I wonder what happened to all the work done to expose the security flaws in the post-HAVA computerized voting machines?
You don’t hear much about the security flaws these days, but I somehow think most of them have not really been addressed.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
Of course he’s polling lower than chlamydia. The process of getting chlamydia is a lot more fun, and it’s easier to get rid of afterward.
boatboy_srq
FIFY.
Srsly. These volk are just panicked that they’re on the wrong end of history.
You would think that all the whinging about “voter fraud” would dissipate at some point as attempt after attempt to “rectify” the rolls fail as spectacularly as the last attempts in FL and PA have done. The obsession with what Teh Dhemocrat does is a mirror into what the GOTea intends. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that the Teahadists are convinced that Dems like Big Gubmint just because, which is how they envision themselves as different/better than Dems, so it’s defensible that they’re obsessed with Dem malfeasance because they intend their own bad behavior in a sort of “ends justify the means” end-run at Big Gubmint’s Death by Bathtub.
In FL’s case, though, it doesn’t help to have a history of yahoos like Buddy Johnson and Katherine Harris running things. Although Johnson probably manipulated the rolls the way the Teahad wants them manipulated, and Harris certainly did.
@Svensker: When you’re constantly reminded by your chosen Voices of Reason that you’re Righteous, Patriotic, Wholesome and in Teh Majority, proofs to the contrary are easy to dismiss, and results that don’t go your way simply have to be skullduggery by Teh Enemy. See Romney, 2012 Election, for a recent illustration.
@Betty Cracker: “polling lower than chlamydia” – that’s brilliant. We need more reminders that the Teahad is a social disease.
Origuy
@retr2327: If you don’t get rid of dead or moved voters, they stay on the rolls forever. California sends out sample ballots to every registered voter which include the texts of the propositions. Sending those out to defunct voters would get expensive fast. Plus there’s the added complexity of having many people registered at the same address. You need a system to keep the registration data reasonably accurate. It just has to be legitimate.
boatboy_srq
@The Ancient Randonneur: One of the main faults in the education system – carefully fostered, first by Northern pols who couldn’t stand being reminded that Virginia was the first English colony, then by the Reichwing who couldn’t wait to hush up all the French/Spanish/Dutch influences in the US – is this colossal gap in US History classes. Read through most K-12 material and you’ll come away with the impression that absolutely nothing happened in the New World between 1492 when Columbus “discovered” it and 1620 when Pilgrims “settled” it. No St. Augustine, no Louisiana Territory (settled by France apparently just for later sale to the US), no Cortez, no New Spain, no New Holland, no Jamestown. it’s really quite remarkable.
gene108
@boatboy_srq:
Why?
Harris became a celebrity for her voter purge, managed to flip the 2000 election for Bush, Jr. because thousands of Gore votes never happened and got elected to a short stint in Congress starting in 2003.
I’m not familiar with Johnson, but the downside for Harris seems more to do with getting caught up with the same corrupt companies that bribed Randy “Duke” Cunningham and getting blown out in the 2006 election more so than anything to do with the 2000 shenanigans.
boatboy_srq
@Hal: The same way you can demand drug testing from all recipients of state aid – because so many of them are abusers, donchano, we can weed out the “takers” better. Except of course the tests showed something like 98% weren’t doing any such thing, and the State – bound by law to support Teh Law-Abiding Citizens™ – wound up on the hook for all the testing fees. On the back end, of course. Does anyone have updates on how many who were forced through this humiliating process have actually been reimbursed?
boatboy_srq
@gene108: Harris got sElected to the US HofR on the USA! USA! USA! wave of ’02. Nothing more than that. She lasted four years and proved to be little more than Michele Bachmann at half volume. Her Senate campaign in 05-06 imploded nearly as spectacularly as Bachmann’s and Perry’s pResidential runs: seems after a while even her own constituents had enough, and nobody wanted to work for her long before the voters decided she should go.
The saddest part is that her replacement in the House, Vern Buchanan, makes Duke Cunningham appear the pinncacle of virtue.
Johnson was uniquely typical for FL. Good-old-boy graft coupled with hubris of the most spectularly Auld South sort. All his political/social cronies got rich while his voters stayed iggerant. Gone, and good riddance.
Davis X. Machina
@boatboy_srq:
This is a bi-partisan delusion.
Check out e.g. DailyKos, where it’s gospel that there are scores of millions of progressive non-voters who never vote because Democrats never nominate left-enough candidates. If they did, all those dark-matter voters would come in off the bench and into the game, thereby delivering the Scandinavian social democracy we all want, and can’t get, in a single election cycle.
Because it’s unthinkable that in an election where everyone voted, and sufficiently progressive candidates were nominated, the progressives would ever lose.
If you have to hypothesize false consciousness as the real reason why you keep losing seats, you’ll keep losing seats.
Kay
@Origuy:
They actually drop off for inactivity after a certain period in Ohio. No one takes their name off the list when they move, but there’s a form for it! I took my daughter off because she “resides” in PA and I knew she was voting there. The reason I knew PA was a disaster was because she had real trouble, and she was genuinely making a good faith effort. I had trouble parsing the rules in PA, because they went thru two agencies, MV and Bd of Elections.
I’ve been registered in 5 different states and I never once took my name off the previous state list. It could cause all kinds of confusion, though. I think it will be the next fake scandal. A pol or regular person will be “discovered!” to be registered in more than one state. There have to be tens of millions of duplicates.
I shouldn’t give the voter fraud grifter industry any ideas.
gene108
@Origuy:
Yup.
I moved out of NC in December 1996. My mom got some GOTV folks knocking on her door in 2008 asking if I was home and interested in voting.
I think I could’ve voted twice in a few elections, because my mom still got voter registration cards in my name. I could’ve voted first thing in NJ and then hopped in my car hand hauled down to NC and voted again.
There are of course real world restraints in doing this, but in theory it could happen.
boatboy_srq
@Davis X. Machina: Facing the reality of the electorate is important. But comparing DKOS and FDL with Newscorp isn’t practical either: the segment of the Reichwing that’s fully under the Murcoch/Koch/Limbaugh/Beck umbrella is measurably larger, far more effectively propagandized, and immediately visible among our Red State relatives. The point isn’t that that kind of fiction isn’t available to the Left – the point is that enough people like Svensker’s relation exist and genuinely believe the pap they’re fed. There’s very little BSDI here when there are (perhaps) millions spent publishing DKOS and tens of billions spent airing Fauxnews.
Davis X. Machina
@boatboy_srq: Difference in degree, not in kind.
Kay
@boatboy_srq:
I don’t really blame those media celebrities. I blame straight reporters. Voter impersonation fraud is implausible as stated. Any person with ordinary common sense could have applied some thought to that and questioned it based on nothing other than walking thru the process of registration and voting. No one did. It’s been 13 years. Conservatives rolled it out as a theory in 2000 (Milwaukee, Wisconsin was Patient Zero for the epidemic of stupidity). 13 years of treating something that is ridiculous as if it were valid.
It never should have gotten this far. They had a duty to shut it down. They were too scared to do that. If I start a ridiculous “fraud” rumor about another state recording process, auto titles, for example, and all of media repeat it, who is to blame for the result?
Dave Anderson
@Ruckus: Oh completely agree — doing a good job of competently managing public interest data is important, expensive and boring as hell — it does not rile up the base.
Kay
@boatboy_srq:
John Fund of the WSJ launched specific and vicious allegations against ordinary voters in Milwaukee, and he has been beating that drum for a decade now.
Dave Weigel says John Fund is a “journalist”, which of course lends Fund’s outrageous attacks on minority voters credibility.
Loyalty to the “journalism” club trumps facts, and it trumps the interests of ordinary voters in Milwaukee.
Voter fraudsters punch DOWN, and that includes the high-profile people spreading the rumors while pretending to be journalists.
Dave Anderson
@retr2327: Value of cleaning lists —
As others mentioned, voter registration lists are often used to generate mailing lists. Assuming anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar per item mailed as a cost for election notification/ballot samples sent to voters, a municipality will want as high a percentage of its mailings to actually hit live voters or potential voters. Furthermore, quite a few states use their voter rolls as the jury duty pool, so again, a clean list will allow for more effective governance.
Finally, a clean list or at least a cleaner list which removes dead Joe Smith Sr. while keeping Joe Smith Jr. and Joe Smith III on the list makes election day easier for the poll workers and the campaigns.
boatboy_srq
@Davis X. Machina: By that math, the local farmer who uses RoundUp on the front lawn of his house is no better than ConAgra. Scale, in this context, is everything. There will always be some who are dissatisfied with the status quo and who think there are more like them who just need motivation to advance The Cause. Those on the left remain a fringe, with minimal support, and an even smaller voting bloc; those on the right have had a global bullhorn and nearly-unlimited cash for two decades now and the results are increasingly obvious. Without the big backers and a whole network of their own the Reichwing would still be a bunch of Birchers printing flyers in their basements and planning for the End times in their own individual basements; instead we have them getting a mainstream venue for their agitprop and enough campaign cash to bombard folks into voting for them. We’re not talking about a small slice of the electoral pie: we’re talking about the vast plurality – if not an absolute majority – of GOTea voters.
The likelihood that each of us knows at least one of each without the relevant context is pointless: the fact that each of us, relatively insulated in Progland, can point to people we’re personally acquainted with (or related to) who have been this successfully programmed by the opposition says a good deal more.
boatboy_srq
@Kay: WSJ hasn’t been exactly neutral in this, and the recent Newscorp buy only makes it worse – and makes my point further. DXM seems to think that, because there are folks at FDL and DKOS who think the opposite, that there’s equal blame – and there’s not. When you’re discussing effect, the ability to blanket a segment of the populace with misinformation weighs a lot heavier than the nattering of fringe talking heads. This goes hand-in-hand with the public misconceptions of the recent “scandals” at the IRS, State Dept and DoJ: there’s a lot of Reichwing hyperventilating, which gets thoroughly covered, and then as the story proves without merit and/or based on selective investigation the journalism drops off – but the public holds onto the perception of “scandal” because there’s no real coverage dispelling that.
What you bring up is useful too: there’s conventional wisdom on the left that there are more libprog voters than exercise the franchise – but there’s an entire industry on the right dedicated to maintaining the illusion that Good Patriotic Right-Thinking Hetero Xtian Ahmurrcans™ remain in the majority and should rightfully remain so.
retr2327
@Dave Anderson:
Well, perhaps I should have been a little more careful in how I put it; I did not mean to suggest that wholesale neglect of the voter rolls would be a good thing. But, OTOH, anytime you endorse a project to go through the voting lists and remove ostensibly dead voters, you run the very real risk (and sometimes that’s the whole purpose) of pruning out live, but relatively inactive, voters as well.
And if I have to choose between saving the county .50$ on an extra mailing to a dead voter versus disenfranchising a live voter, I know which one I’m choosing.
Of course, I suspect the way to reconcile these conflicting policy goals is with wholesale implementation of last-minutre registration, provisional ballots, etc., so that the risk of disenfranchisement is minimized, and the remedy for a voter improperly removed is as convenient as possible. But, somehow, those measures tend not to be part of the voter roll clean-up projects . . .
Kay
@boatboy_srq:
So, ask yourself. If someone had floated the idea that a whole bunch of white people in, oh, Ames, Iowa, were impersonating other people to vote unlawfully, would media have swallowed that whole and sold it without thinking it through, questioning it or asking an expert?
I don’t think they would have because it’s outrageous in the sense that it’s unbelievable and it’s also insulting as hell to those voters. WTF? The WSJ repeated this claim with absolutely no proof?
It had to be Milwaukee, and it had to be minority voters, and it was, in 2000. They’re all presumptive felons anyway, right?
mclaren
There’s a lot wrong with “cleaning up” voter rolls. Voting fraud is such a fraction-of-one-percent issue that it’s a complete non-problem.