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.
Read more:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/florida-gop-takes-voter-supression-to-a-brazen-new-extreme-20120530#ixzz1z3EMlv63