Florida Governor Rick Scott and his Secretary of State, Ken Dentzer, really don’t like it that minorities can vote in their state. They’re also incompetent.
In late 2011, Scott ordered a statewide purge of all “non-citizens” from the voter files. Despite questions about the accuracy of the purge list, Dentzer ordered local elections supervisors to mail letters to thousands in 2012, informing them that they appeared to be ineligible to vote. Hundreds of these letters went to U.S. citizens who were indeed legitimate voters, including a 91-year-old WWII veteran. After seeing the high error rates, even in a pared down list of “sure-fire” non-citizens, election officials of both parties spoke out and called a halt to the efforts. The U.S. Department of Justice also demanded an end to the purge, deeming it illegal under the Voting Rights Act.
Dentzer pared down the initial list to just 198 names of people he deemed non-citizen voters. Even that turned up almost no non-citizens who had actually ever voted — just 39 of the state’s 11 million-plus registered voters. And even that small list included some documented U.S. citizens. Still, Dentzer called the purge effort his “passion” and “moral duty.”
Despite this pathetic record of failure and the nakedness of their effort to purge Democratic voters off the voting rolls, they just kept going.
Once again, Ken Dentzer, Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) handpicked Secretary of State, has unsuccessfully attempted to mount a massive purge of Florida’s voter rolls. And once again, he has been forced to abandon this effort due to his lack of an accurate list of who is and is not eligible to vote.
In a memo, Dentzer told the state’s local election supervisors that the purge would be postponed until 2015. He plans to utilize a new federal database which he believes will be up and running by then and will provide more accurate data on who is and is not a U.S. citizen.
Until the Republicans began hyping non-existent in-person voter fraud, I never thought that the American people would tolerate such an affront to our democracy. If you’d asked me, I’d have predicted that people were so committed to the sanctity of the right to vote that they’d rise up and hang anyone who tried to purge the voting rolls of people who are completely entitled to vote.
It turns out, Republican voters are mostly fine with these tactics, and most every one else doesn’t give a shit either way.
Except, black folks. They happened to notice that these purges were aimed entirely at people of color, and they voted at a higher rate than whites in the last election.
