‘Racist’ Florida vote purge obeys law

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“Gov. Wallace was the face of the original Jim Crow,” says MoveOn.org’s Garlin Gilchrist II. “Now, Gov. Scott is the face of Jim Crow 2.0.”

Liberals once again are foaming at their mouths over mainly conservative initiatives to prevent vote fraud. The trigger for the Left’s latest rabid attack is Gov. Rick Scott’s efforts to verify the accuracy of Florida’s voter rolls.

Responding to Scott’s and similar programs, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asked the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, “Do we want to be the first generation to restrict the ability of American citizens to vote? We have a bad history in that regard ...”

A Tampa Bay Times editorial accused Scott of “standing between Floridians and their right to vote as U.S. citizens.” MoveOn called Scott’s project a “racist voter purge.”

So, where did Scott decide to scrutinize Florida’s rolls for ineligible voters? At a KKK rally? At a white-power retreat deep inside the Everglades with neo-Nazi David Duke?

Not quite.

In fact, Scott’s measures are required by federal law.

The 1993 National Voter Registration Act (AKA Motor Voter) holds that “A State shall ... systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.” Further, the 2002 Helping America Vote Act, adopted after 2000’s Bush v. Gore recount fiasco in ... where again? Oh, yes ... Florida, commands that “The appropriate State or local election official shall perform list maintenance with respect to the computerized list on a regular basis ... For purposes of removing names of ineligible voters ...”

Like an overgrown lawn, Florida’s voter rolls screamed for attention. When Sunshine State officials compared voter lists with the Social Security Death Index, they discovered 51,308 registered voters who happened to be dead. The Scott administration should perform a national service by checking those names against voter records to determine how many people kept voting after they stopped breathing.

Last September, Florida asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for access to its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) national citizenship database. DHS has stonewalled Florida’s request, and those from Colorado, Michigan and North Carolina. As Florida’s Secretary of State Ken Detzner wrote the U.S. Justice Department on June 6, “a chain of emails dating back nine months ... demonstrates DHS’s refusals and delays in this regard.”

Florida then examined its driver’s license applications against voter rolls. It discovered 182,000 potential non-citizen registered voters. SAVE could determine which drivers had become naturalized, but DHS will not share this record with Florida.

A sub-sample of 2,600 of these 182,000 possible aliens yielded at least 500 now-naturalized citizens as well as, so far, 104 confirmed non-citizen registered voters, 56 of whom feloniously have voted. If representative, this sample extrapolates to 7,280 registered non-citizens, 3,920 of whom may have voted and may do so again. Given that George W. Bush won Florida and, thus, the White House, by just 537 votes, Americans should rail against the possibility that more than seven times as many aliens could be poised to elect the next president of the United States.

Rather than encourage it to fix this mess, the Obama administration has sued Florida to stop it from complying with relevant federal laws. Team Obama claims that Scott’s statewide electoral hygiene campaign violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act, although that law covers only five of Florida’s 67 counties.

The Justice Department also says Florida cannot clean its voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election, namely Aug. 14’s congressional primary. The Nov. 6 general election is within 90 days of the primary, further precluding voter-list maintenance, according to Obama legal interpretation.

Rep. Thomas J. Rooney, R-Fla., captured the frustration many Floridians feel as the Obama administration labors feverishly against ballot integrity. As Rooney wrote Holder on June 6: “While your department should be working with Florida to stop voter fraud, you are instead actively working to keep noncitizens — who have committed a felony — on our state’s voter rolls.”

Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service.

Tags: opinion, syndicates