I've been
chronicling the story of Florida's awful "ineligible voter purge" that's been specifically targeting African-American and Latino voters in the state, and has already caught up a number of citizens lawfully allowed to vote who now must prove to the state they are US citizens or lose their right to vote. Florida Republicans of course "regret" any errors or any problems this may cause, surely.
On Thursday Eric Holder and the Justice Department's Voting Rights Division told Florida to knock these little Jim Crow era games off, saying that the practice violated the pre-clearance clause for the state in the Voting Rights Act.
Late Friday, Florida's Secretary of State responded with a
resounding "Eat shit and die".
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.
“We have an obligation to make sure the voter rolls are accurate and
we are going to continue forward and do everything that we can legally
do to make sure than ineligible voters cannot vote,” said Chris Cate, a
spokesman for Detzner. “We are firmly committed to doing the right thing
and preventing ineligible voters from being able to cast a ballot. We
are not going to give up our efforts to make sure the voter rolls are
accurate."
Should in the efforts of the pursuit of making the voter rolls "accurate" Florida's GOP government knock tens of thousands of African-Americans and Latino citizens who are eligible to vote off the rolls and take away that right to vote in November's election in error, then unfortunately that's the price to pay to stop the massive voter fraud of...what was it again? Oh yes, the massive fraud of "Democrats being allowed to vote in a red state".
Can't have that. Eggs will be cracked in the pursuit of omelet accuracy.
Warehouses full of them, apparently. Somebody figured out that the people who will get cracked over this aren't going to be Rick Scott or Ken Detzner, but the county election supervisors.
And apparently, they want no beef from the Justice Department.
The Justice Department letter and mistakes that the 67 county elections
supervisors have found in the state list make the scrub undoable, said
Martin County Elections Supervisor Vicki Davis, president of the Florida
State Association of Supervisors of Elections.
"There are just too many variables with this entire process at this time
for supervisors to continue," Davis said.
Ron Labasky, the association's general counsel, sent a memo to the 67
supervisors Friday telling them to stop processing the list.
"I recommend that Supervisors of Elections cease any further action until
the issues raised by the Department of Justice are resolved between the
parties or by a Court," Labasky wrote.
Davis said the effect on supervisors will be "if they've started the
process and they do find out that someone is ineligible to vote and they
have credible and reliable information to back it up, then they will remove
that person from the database. But if they have not had contact with someone
on the list, they're stopping at that point."
Going to be kind of hard for Scott to get his purge if his minions aren't going to do it because their legal counsel is saying "Don't you even think about it."
So who will prevail here, Scott or the county elections supervisors? We'll see.