So, as I’ve documented before, Lee County is leading the way in the Great Florida Voter Purge.
Fully 44 out of the 107 individuals purged by the Florida Secretary of State for being “Potential NonCitizens” are from Lee County alone.
Back in April, the Florida Secretary of State sent the names of 2,625 “Potential NonCitizens” to the state’s 67 Supervisors of Elections for removal.
Most of the Supervisors were wise enough to doubt the veracity of the list. But many of them nevertheless sent out letters to the “potential noncitizens” asking these registered voters to provide documentation proving they were eligible to vote.
On that list of 2,625 “potential noncitizens” sent out by the Florida SOS were the names of 13 residents of Lee County. The Supervisor of Elections, Sharon Harrington, dutifully went about verifying whether or not these suspected “noncitizens” in Lee County were eligible or not to be on the voter rolls. She determined that two of the 13 “potential noncitizens” targeted by the Florida SOS were not eligible to vote. She forwarded the names of the two women born in the early 1970s–one a Democrat who registered to vote in 2001 and has never voted, and one who last voted in the 2008 General Election and is registered with the “Unknown Party”–to the Secretary of State’s office for removal.
But SOE Harrington didn’t stop there. She forwarded an additional 42 names to the Secretary of State for removal. The Secretary of State’s office includes those 42 individuals in its touted list of 107 “potential noncitizens” that have been removed from the polls under the directive by Governor Rick Scott.
Yet, there is not a shred of evidence that SOE Harrington actually verified whether these individuals were not citizens and thereby ineligible to be on the voter rolls. Rather, she’s relied on information on forms filled out by potential jurors provided by the local clerk of the courts.
According to Harrington, her office has been working closely with the local clerk of courts to ferret out ineligible voters by matching names on the Lee County voter rolls with the names of potential jurors who asked to be excused from duty because they claimed they were not citizens.
“No, I’m not a vulture,” Harrington, a Republican, told the Naples News recently.
Vulture or not, there’s no way to know whether the potential jurors lied about their citizenship to get out of jury duty.
Of the 42 individuals that Lee County purged on its own, and that Governor Scott’s office has celebrated as being “potential noncitizens” that are now off the voter rolls, 12 were not even registered to vote in Lee County as of April 1, 2012. There is absolutely no indication that these individuals, tossed off the voter rolls and touted as “potential noncitizens” being removed to save the state from voter fraud, were not citizens and legally registered voters.
Of the remaining 30 individuals who were purged by the Lee SOE and included in the Florida Secretary of State’s list of “potential noncitizens,” 4 are African Americans, 11 are Hispanic, 13 are White, 1 is Asian American, and the race/ethnicity of 1 is unknown. As for party registration of the 30 who were dubiously identified by the Lee SOE to be “noncitizens,” 12 are registered Democrats, 6 are NPAs, 11 are Republicans, and (yet another) was registered with the “Unknown Party.”
The takeaway point here, however, is that SOE Harrington appears to be stripping individuals of their voting rights by using information from jury duty forms that may not accurately inform whether an individual is a citizen or not.
As I’ve written before, I don’t condone fibbing to get out of jury duty. And of course, when these individuals were called for jury duty, they may very well not have been American citizens at the time, but have been subsequently naturalized as such.
What’s more troubling than avoiding jury duty, of course, is that Lee County is apparently disenfranchising voters–stripping them of their constitutional right–based on untrue or outdated statements made by individuals to avoid jury duty.
The practice must stop.
ElectionSmith 