Politics Wires

Florida county elections supervisors won't resume voter purge

 

The Miami Herald

Florida’s noncitizen voter purge looks like it’s all but over.

The 67 county elections supervisors — who have final say over voter purges —are not moving forward with the purge for now because nearly all of them don’t trust the accuracy of a list of nearly 2,700 potential noncitizens identified by the state’s elections office.The U.S. Department of Justice has ordered the state to stop the purge.

“We’re just not going to do this,” said Leon County’s elections supervisor, Ion Sancho, one of the most outspoken of his peers. “I’ve talked to many of the other supervisors and they agree. The list is bad. And this is illegal.”

So far, more than 500 have been identified as citizens and lawful voters on the voter rolls. About 40 people statewide have been identified as noncitizens. At least four might have voted and could be guilty of a third-degree felony.

The eligibility of about 2,000 have not been identified one way or the other.

Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner says he hopes to get the supervisors to reverse course by working more closely with them. His effort has also inspired a noncitizen voter-purge movement in North Carolina, whose secretary of state Detzner plans to speak with on Friday. And while the Florida purge has halted, the fight between the state and the feds has just begun now that the Justice Department demanded last week that the state cease the purge due to two federal voting laws. Detzner said the U.S. government didn’t just get the law wrong, it’s harming the state’s efforts to remove ineligible voters by refusing to provide Florida access to a citizenship and immigration database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security.

“We need to do a better job,” Detzner acknowledged. But we can’t do a better job. And the reason is Homeland Security has pushed us back.”

Detzner, whose office has been requesting access to the database since October, has asked to sit down with Homeland Security to meet its demands and get access to the database. That way, the state could produce a more accurate and easy-to-check list for elections supervisors, he said. Without access to the federal database, the state matched its voter rolls with a Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles database that contains some citizenship information gathered when someone gets a state-issued ID.

But that database isn’t updated when a person becomes a citizen. So many people became U.S. citizens and then lawfully registered to vote — but they can look like noncitizen voters when the elections department compares the motor-vehicle database against. To get around the problem, DHSMV has asked the federal government to give it updated citizenship information.

That would make Miami-Dade Election Supervisor Penelope Townsley feel more comfortable. She said in a written letter last week that she was concerned the list was unreliable and was “only as good as the last time the voter made contact with the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.”

Miami-Dade has determined that 514 people on the list are citizens. About 14 are noncitizens. At least two have voted and have had their names forwarded to the State Attorney’s Office for investigation.

Townsley faulted the state for producing a list of about 1,600 voters that had no backup information and that contained duplicate IDs and the names of already removed voters, including three dead people.

Read more Politics Wires stories from the Miami Herald

  • AP source: Treasury told WH of IRS disclosure plan

    A Treasury official says the department told the White House twice that the IRS was preparing to make public its targeting of conservative political groups.

  •  

A child is carried from the rubble of the Plaza Towers Elementary School following a tornado in Moore, Okla., Monday, May 20, 2013. A tornado as much as a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide with winds up to 200 mph (320 kph) roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods, setting buildings on fire and landing a direct blow on an elementary school.

    Obama pledges help after Oklahoma tornado

    President Barack Obama has called Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin to express his concern about a monstrous tornado that wreaked havoc in the Oklahoma City suburbs.

  •  

The White House in Washington D.C.

    White House: More top aides knew about IRS probe

    The White House acknowledged Monday that senior aides to President Barack Obama knew a month ago that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative groups, expanding on previous administration statements about who in the White House knew about the inquiry and when they knew about it.

Miami Herald

Join the
Discussion

The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere on the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

The Miami Herald uses Facebook's commenting system. You need to log in with a Facebook account in order to comment. If you have questions about commenting with your Facebook account, click here.

Have a news tip? You can send it anonymously. Click here to send us your tip - or - consider joining the Public Insight Network and become a source for The Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald.

Hide Comments

This affects comments on all stories.

Cancel OK

  • Videos

  • Quick Job Search

Enter Keyword(s) Enter City Select a State Select a Category