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.