How Florida Governor Rick Scott Could Steal The Election For Mitt Romney

[babylonsister]

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/05/28/491120/how-florida-governor-rick-scott-could-steal-the-election-for-mitt-romney/

How Florida Governor Rick Scott Could Steal The Election For Mitt Romney

By Judd Legum on May 28, 2012 at 11:00 am


On Wednesday, November 7, Mitt Romney could wake up as the President-elect thanks to one man: Florida Governor Rick Scott. With little fanfare, Scott is undertaking an audacious plan to kick thousands of Floridians off the ballot just before this year’s elections. It’s a sloppy, chaotic and possibly illegal plan. But it just might work. Here’s how:

1. Scott has created a massive list of Floridians to purge from the voting rolls before the election. Late last year, Governor Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” But Browning did not have access to reliable citizenship data. The state attempted to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing the voting file with data from the state motor vehicle administration, but the motor vehicle data does not contain updated citizenship information. The process, which created a list of 182,000 people, was considered so flawed by Browning that he refused to release the data to county election officials. Browning resigned in February and Scott has pressed forward with the purge, starting with about 2600 voters.

2. The list of “ineligible” voters is riddled with errors and includes hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens. According to data obtained by ThinkProgress, in Miami-Dade county alone, 1638 people were flagged by the state as “non-citizens.” Already, 359 people on the list have provided the county with proof of citizenship and 26 people were identified as U.S. citizens directly by the county. The remaining 1200 have simply not responded to the letter informing them of their purported ineligibility. Similar problems have been identified in Polk County and Broward County.

3. Scott’s list is heavily targeted at Democratic and Hispanic voters. A study by the Miami Herald found that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted in a state hunt to remove thousands of noncitizens from Florida’s voting rolls.” For example, Hispanics comprise 58 percent of the list but just 13 percent of eligible voters. Conversely, “Whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal.”

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Will history repeat itself in Florida this year? By one estimate, 7000 Florida voters were wrongfully removed from the voter rolls for the 2000 presidential election — 13 times George W. Bush’s margin of victory in that state after the U.S. Supreme Court halted the post-election recount.

[onehandle]

1. The President cannot depend on Florida or Ohio. The fix is in. nt

[SoCalDem]

2. Which is why we cannot ever plan on Florida

[loyalsister]

3. Are the authors of these articles RWers?

I have talked to several people who will not bother to vote because "the fix is in."
There are ways to combat these things without suggesting this election will be stolen.

[monmouth]

4. The Democratic Party down here is almost non-existent and Debbie WS is a huge disappointment.

DOJ must start NOW to get a hold of this. No one else appears to be fighting this that I can see.

[no_hypocrisy]

5. It worked before in 2000 and it will likely work again.

Even if lawsuits were filed preemptively right now, they wouldn't necessarily be resolved by Election Day.

[ieoeja]

6. "By one estimate, 7000 ... wrongfully removed ... 2000 presidential election"

First time I ever saw an estimate anywhere close to being that low. The estimates I have always seen were 50,000 to 80,000.

[msongs]

7. Once upon a time we had a DOJ that was on top of this sort of thing. too bad nt

[librechik]

8. This is true and very very dangerous.

SCOTUS still in conflict of interest is AOK mode, too.