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."
Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark announced Friday that she halted processing the list of potential non-citizen voters distributed to all Florida Supervisors of Elections by the Division of Elections.
..."We’ve been told not to proceed with the verification process, and we don’t want to take anyone off the list who could be an eligible voter," Whitlock told Patch. "At this point we are just stopping the process. Not doing anything else with it further."
...a handful of Democratic Florida lawmakers are pushing back, arguing in a letter to Gov. Rick Scott that the process "fails to meet the basic standards of accountability" and that proceeding with it would be "irresponsible."
...In Tuesday's letter, Florida Democratic lawmakers Ted Deutch, Alcee Hastings, Corinne Brown, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Frederica Wilson and Kathy Castor contend that "providing a list of names with questionable validity - created with absolutely no oversight - to county supervisors and asking that they purge their rolls will create chaotic results and further undermine Floridians' confidence in the integrity of our elections."
"Given that this process fails to meet basic standards of accountability, and that the legal authority for automatic removal of registered voters is currently being challenged in both state and federal court, it is irresponsible to proceed so quickly and with so little room for oversight," the letter reads.
The election-year effort, led by a Republican-appointed secretary of state, has increasingly become a focus of concern among Democrats, liberals and civil-liberties groups. They worry that the state could wind up removing lawful voters from the rolls.
...When they register to vote, Hispanics are flocking to the Democratic Party or to the no-party-affiliation label — nicknamed “NPA” — a sign the Republican Party’s hard-line immigration stances are turning off Latinos.
Those potential noncitizens who register as NPAs have been disproportionately flagged in the state’s computer sweep. ... Democrats are the most-likely to be flagged, in large part because their party has the biggest ranks in Florida. They make up 40 percent of the voter rolls and 40 percent of the potential noncitizens.
“We have a constipation Congress. These Republican obstructionists wouldn’t pass gas if they thought it might help our president heal our economy...O'Malley's speech goes along with President Obama's Weekly Address entitled "It's Time for Congress to Get to Work," Obama also put the blame on the stonewalling of Congress on nearly every issue, but especially jobs programs.
Job creation is up. Unemployment is down. And while we still have a lot more work to do, because of President Obama’s leadership General Motors is alive and hiring and Osama bin Laden is not!
Could our nation’s jobs recovery be happening faster? Sure it could. but that would require compromise, practicality, and a focus on the common good — three concepts which the newly radicalized tea party Republican Congress is now totally incapable of grasping."
Right now, this country is still fighting our way back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The economy is growing again, but it’s not growing fast enough. Our businesses have created almost 4.3 million new jobs over the last twenty-seven months, but as we learned in this week’s jobs report, we’re not creating them fast enough. And just like last year at this time, our economy faces some serious headwinds. Gas prices are starting to come down again, but when they spiked over the last few months, it hit people’s wallets pretty hard. The crisis in Europe’s economy has cast a shadow on our own. And all of this makes it even more challenging to fully recover and lay the foundation for an economy that’s built to last.
But from the moment we first took action to prevent another depression, we knew the road to recovery wouldn’t be easy. We knew it would take time, that there would be ups and downs along the way. But we also knew that if we were willing to act wisely, and boldly, and together; if we were willing to keep at it, and never quit, we would come back stronger.
. . . I sent Congress a jobs bill last September full of the kinds of bipartisan ideas that would have put our fellow Americans back to work and helped reinforce our economy against those outside shocks. I sent them a plan that would have reduced the deficit by $4 trillion in a way that’s balanced – that pays for the job-creating investments we need by cutting unnecessary spending and asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes.
Since then, Congress has only passed a few parts of that jobs bill, like a tax cut that’s allowing working Americans to keep more of your paycheck every week. That was important. But Congress hasn’t acted on enough of the other ideas in that bill that would make a difference and help create jobs right now. And there’s no excuse for that. Not when so many people are looking for work. Not when so many people are struggling to pay the bills.
So my message to Congress is, get to work.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle told the state it cannot require groups to submit voter registration forms within 48 hours or face $1,000 fines. Nor can the state force those groups to disclose names of volunteers who don't collect the forms, Hinkle ruled.
"The short deadline, coupled with substantial penalties for non-compliance, make voter registration drives a risky business," Hinkle wrote. "If the goal is to discourage voter registration drives and thus make it harder for new voters to register, the 48-hour deadline may succeed."
... Hinkle said voter registration activity is protected speech under the First Amendment. His injunction means that groups will have 10 days to submit voter forms, as they did before the law was changed.
. . . It's a victory for three grass roots groups that brought the lawsuit: Rock the Vote, the Florida Public Interest Group Education Fund and the League of Women Voters of Florida, which suspended all voter registration efforts after the law took effect.
"We are really delighted," said Deirdre MacNab, president of the League of Women Voters. "It knocks out the poor parts of an unreasonable and unconstitutional law. Our volunteers are eager to get back to work."
T. Christian Herren, chief of the department's voting section, sent a letter to Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner that said the state's actions appear to violate two federal voting laws. Florida has used a search of a driver's license database to try to identify non-citizens who are ineligible to vote. Herren's letter said the actions do not comply with part of the federal Voting Rights Act that requires Florida to get a sign-off from the Department of Justice or a federal court for actions that affect five counties with a history of discrimination.Of course, Florida is protesting that it never meant to suppress the vote. They are just saving the country from voter fraud.
. . . The letter also said Florida could be violating another law known as the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which includes standards for how voter lists are maintained. Part of the law requires states to finish the systematic removal of ineligible voters 90 days before a primary or general election --- a deadline that passed May 16 for Florida, which has a primary on Aug. 14. The Department of Justice gave Detzner less than a week to say how the state will deal with the possible legal violations.
. . . "Specifically, please advise whether the state intends to cease the practice discussed above, so that the department can determine what further action, if any, is necessary."
In a statement, Chris Cate said the decision to remove names from the list was essential to preventing non-citizens from casting ballots illegally.Yeah, right. *eyeroll*
"The Department of State has a duty under both state and federal laws to ensure that Florida's voter registration rolls are current and accurate. Therefore, identifying ineligible voters is something we are always doing," Cate wrote.
He added that the action was not meant to prevent minority voters from voting.
"The political party and race of the potential non-citizens is not a factor at all in our process," Cate wrote. "We are only concerned about identifying ineligible voters and making sure they can't cast a ballot."
