(NEW YORK) MintPress — Another presidential election, another controversy over Florida’s voter registration laws.
Republican governor Rick Scott and his supporters maintain new changes in state election laws are needed to get rid of voter fraud, while critics claim they are part of an effort to restrict voting by Democratic-leaning groups such as young people, the poor and minorities.
In May 2011, Florida’s Republican-dominated legislature passed, and Governor Scott signed, a sweeping election law that cut short early voting and required voter registration groups to turn in applications within 48 hours of the time they are signed or face fines.
The threat led many groups that normally registered voters to abandon their efforts. A recent analysis of Florida registration data by The New York Times found that “in the months since its new law took effect…81,471 fewer Floridians have registered to vote than during the same period before the 2008 presidential election.”
Recently, the state announced that it would start another round of voter purging to make sure that no ineligible voters were mistakenly on the rolls. In early May, Florida’s Secretary of State Ken Detzner announced a list of 182,000 suspected non citizens to be removed from the voting rolls; seven thousand alleged felons had already been taken off in the first four months of this year.
According to a report in The Miami Herald last week, “So far, Florida has flagged 2,700 non citizen voters and sent the list to county elections supervisors, who have found the data and methodology to be flawed and problematic. The list of potential non citizen voters — many of whom have turned out to be lawful citizens and voters — disproportionately hits minorities, especially Hispanics.”
“We are very, very concerned about this news because of the track record in this state of purging thousands of voters who should not have been purged,” said the president of the Florida League of Women Voters (LWV), Deirdre McNabb. “We’re deeply troubled and appalled this is happening just months before a major national election.”
Troubling track record
The attempted manipulation of voter rolls is nothing new in Florida.
In 2000, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 12,000 eligible voters were wrongly identified as convicted felons and expunged from the voting rolls in Florida. That’s 22 times more than Republican George W. Bush’s 537 vote lead over Democrat Al Gore.
African Americans, who favored Gore over Bush by 86 points, accounted for 11 percent of the state’s electorate but 41 percent of those purged.
In 2004, then-governor Jeb Bush tried to do the same thing to help his brother win reelection, but he was forced to retreat in the face of a large public outcry.
Ray of light
In response to a lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters, Rock the Vote and the Florida Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, a Florida district court judge last week issued a preliminary injunction against the state’s crackdown on voter registration drives.
“When a plaintiff loses an opportunity to register a voter,” wrote Judge Robert Hinkle, “the opportunity is gone forever.”
That same day, the Justice Department told Florida that it needs to get approval for its voting purge under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to make sure it does not discriminate against minority voters.
“There are lots of things that can go wrong when you have these large-scale systematic purges,” said the Brennan Center’s senior counsel, Myrna Perez. “They need to be done really carefully, with a lot of transparency, well in advance of the election. And this is too close.”
But over the weekend, Florida said it will defy the DOJ warning. A spokesman for Secretary of State Detzner said they are going to continue forward to do everything that they can legally do to make sure ineligible voters cannot vote.
Critical state
Detzner is not the only GOP secretary of state in the country to implement voter purges, but his actions could impact the November election more than most.
Florida has more electoral votes than any other swing state, and the battle to win it is expected to be fierce.
In an NBC-Marist poll of battleground states released last week, Obama had a narrow lead in Florida, 48 percent compared to 44 percent for Republican challenger Mitt Romney. NBC noted that the president’s share was “below the 50 percent threshold usually considered safe haven for an incumbent president.”
The voter battles in several states are likely to carry on even past the election. In the meantime, 4 out of 10 eligible voters in Florida are not registered to vote.