Honored to be mentioned by US Senator Bill Nelson in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in today’s hearing on Voting Rights. The research that he mentioned, which I coauthored with Michael Herron at Dartmouth College, is available here.
Archives for category: Voter Purge
That’s right.
10
Out of 11.2 million or so voters on the official statewide rolls as of April 1, 2012.
Here’s some quick analysis…
Approximately 0.000088496% of the current statewide voter roll may have voted illegally once (or perhaps more) over the past decade or so.
The percentage is even less when you consider the tens of MILLIONS of votes cast in local and statewide elections in Florida since 2006.
Notwithstanding the hundreds of Florida citizens who have been falsely accused by the Florida Secretary of State as being “potential noncitizens” who are supposedly corrupting the integrity of our voting system, it’s great to see that Governor Scott has exposed the myth of voter fraud in Florida.
Or not.
You see, the Florida Division of Elections, in its ill-advised and likely illegal effort to purge the voter rolls of what it claims are “potential noncitizens,” originally identified some 182,000 individuals who fit the bill.
Well, not confident in its list, the (new) Secretary of State, Ken Detzner (you see, the previous SOS, Kurt Browning, who was no angel himself when it came to protecting the right of Florida citizens to vote, resigned when he didn’t have enough confidence in the purge list his office originally generated, but that Governor Scott wanted him to pursue), pared it down to some 25,000 names, and then, finally, to 2,625 names, which his office then shipped off to the 67 Supervisors of Elections to do his dirty work.
Some of the SOEs balked, understandably.
But after the purging was done by the independently elected Supervisors of Elections, Governor Scott proudly defended the Secretary of State’s effort, saying to NPR, “We found that nearly 100 individuals that are non-U.S. citizens are registered to vote and over 50 have voted in prior elections.”
Now, the facts.
First, as I’ve documented elsewhere on these pages, no evidence has been provided by the Secretary of State that the 107 “potential noncitizens” it touted as being removed from its list were indeed noncitizens.
Second, also as I’ve documented here, a majority of the 107 individuals who were removed from the voter rolls were not even on the Florida Secretary of State’s purge list of 2,625 “potential noncitizens” that it sent to the Supervisors of Elections. Only 41 of the 107 names were on the SOS’s purge list of “potential noncitizens.”
As for those 41 (out of 2,625) individuals who the SOS identified as “potential noncitizens” and who the SOEs removed from the rolls (presumably after the SOEs–who do the actual purging–received proof), I have crunched the numbers, and identifying exactly 10 who may have cast a ballot.
Here’s the breakdown of the epidemic of alleged “noncitizens” voting, with the county and the last date of the election in which someone using that “potential noncitizen’s” name cast a ballot.
| DAD | 11/7/2006 | |
| HIL | 11/7/2006 | |
| DAD | 11/4/2008 | |
| LEE | 11/4/2008 | |
| PAS | 11/4/2008 | |
| OKA | 11/2/2010 | |
| DAD | 6/28/2011 |
| ALA | PRE-2006 | |
| BRO | PRE-2006 | |
| DAD | PRE-2006 |
Really? That’s it? We should have confidence in the Secretary of State’s new effort to purge Florida voters by matching data from the federal Department of Homeland Security with its own admittedly “obsolete” data?
Frankly, I’d rather trust casting a legitimate vote in Senegal.
Of course, you wouldn’t know that reading the completely misleading headline in the “AP NewsBreak” story rushed to publication by the Washington Post and numerous other outlets.
The real headline should be, “Florida Secretary of State Admits Identifying “Potential Noncitizens with ‘Outdated’ Data.”
The pending agreement with the Department of Homeland Security is hardly a “victory” for the GOP, as the Washington Post’s headline screams.
It is true that the Department of Homeland Security reached a pending agreement with the Florida Department of State to allow the Division of Elections to access the federal SAVE database — Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — so as to more accurately identify “potential noncitizens” who might be incorrectly registered to vote in Florida. (Lord knows, the Florida Secretary of State needs help in its endeavors, as I’ve recently documented elsewhere, extensively.
It is important to disassemble the AP’s misleading story regarding the Florida Secretary of State’s “victory.”
First, the pending agreement with Homeland Security prohibits the state of Florida from using only the name and birth date of registered voters when requesting SAVE data to verify whether registered voters are noncitizens. Second, the Division of Elections may only access the SAVE database if it provides a “unique identifier” — such as an “alien number” or a certificate number on a Certificate of Naturalization or Certificate of Citizenship — for those who it suspects may be ineligible to be registered to vote. But the Secretary of State does not (rightly) collect such information on voter registration forms, and the driver’s license records that the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles has provided to the Division of Elections are often inaccurate or outdated, leading to numerous false-positives when they are matched with the voter rolls.
In other words, if Florida Supervisors of Elections end up purging voters from the rolls using inaccurate or outdated information provided to them by the Division of Elections, they risk disenfranchising citizens, stripping them of their right to vote.
So, it is quite questionable how newly acquired access to the federal SAVE database will help ferret out “potential noncitizens,” as most citizens on the Florida voter rolls do not have a “unique identifier” that is included in the federal database.
What is not questionable from the pending agreement is that the Florida Secretary of State has admitted that it has been identifying “potential noncitizens” using ‘outdated’ information.
As Secretary of State Ken Detzner stated in a Letter to Supervisors Regarding SAVE sent to the 67 Supervisors of Elections on Saturday, July 14:
The process to identify potential non-citizens will include a carefully calibrated matching process between the Florida Voter Registration System and the driver’s license records of the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles before any records are verified through SAVE. The existing file of potentially ineligible voters which was created months ago, is now outdated and will not be used as the basis for further action by the Department of State. It should be considered obsolete. (Emphasis in red, mine.)
One would hope that those individuals who are citizens and legally registered, and who were either incorrectly identified as “potential noncitizens” by the Florida Secretary of State, or worse, wrongly purged from the rolls by the Supervisors of Elections in early June because of the use of ‘outdated” or “obsolete” data, will be reinstated.
Clearly, any matching process between datafiles that are created for vastly different purposes may lead to wrongful ‘convictions,’ depriving individuals of the civil rights.
It remains to be seen whether, and how, the Florida Division of Elections will conduct a matching process with the federal SAVE database. For the sake of the rights of all Floridians, let’s hope it is done more carefully and more transparently than the state’s feeble effort earlier this year.
In Illinois.
Attorney Dan Johnson on his blog, Progressive Advocacy, writes:
On July 6, Governor Pat Quinn signed into law SB 3722 (passed with exclusively Democratic votes) that contains two innovative and exciting provisions that will lead to more citizens voting this November. The first extends the period of time when citizens can register to vote and update their address until the Saturday before the election….I suspect more than 25,000 will be able to vote — who otherwise would have been turned away from their ballots because of government-imposed administrative deadlines — in November of 2012.
The second provision of the new law requires election authorities to offer early voting on the college campuses of the major public universities in the state. This requirement will ensure that college students (who often don’t have a car) won’t have to make their way to the obscure office of the county clerk off-campus in order to cast an early ballot, but instead will be able to go to a high-traffic area and cast their ballot during the few weeks before the election when early voting is offered.
Things couldn’t be more different in Florida. In May 2011, when they passed HB 1355, Republican lawmakers cracked down on voter registration drives, cut the days of early voting (and still prohibit it on college campuses), and made it more difficult for students and other transient populations to change their address and cast a regular ballot. And these actions preceded and were independent of Governor Scott asking his Secretary of State to strip eligible citizens of their voting rights through his bogus, systematic purge of the voter rolls.
While Illinois stands as a model for other states that want to expand the franchise, Florida returns to the days of Jim Crow, erecting barriers to prevent citizens from participating in the political process.
No.
But the Florida Secretary of State has claimed that 9 out of the 107 individuals purged from the voter rolls for allegedly being “potential noncitizens” are from Pinellas, Peter’s beloved county on the sandy shores of the Gulf of Mexico.
Funny thing is, though, of the 37 “potential noncitizens” the Division of Elections flagged from Pinellas in its systematic effort in April to cleanse the voter list, only one was removed by the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections, Deborah Clark, after she reviewed the state’s shoddy work. The other 36 individuals wrongly fingered by Secretary of State Ken Detzner in his unwarranted purge are indeed citizens and are eligible to vote.
Whoops.
Oh, and as if this comes as a shock: 59.5% of those wrongly accused by the Secretary of State who are living in Pinellas County are minorities. And only 1/5 were Republicans.
(You can ask Peter what percentage of registered voters in Pinellas are minorities and Republicans).
But cut the Secretary of State and his crack staff some flack.
His list of 37 “potential noncitizens” residing in Pinellas County was accurate 2.7% of the time. (Actually, the Division of Elections ill-advised and likely illegal purge has the fingermarks of an individual who evidently is no longer working in the office. Perhaps more on that later…).
The one “potential noncitizen” snagged in the Governor’s expansive and faulty dragnet–a Hispanic man in his 50s, living in St. Petersburg, who registered to vote in 2001 as a Republican(!)–has never cast a ballot in Florida.
Oh well.
The other 8 “potential noncitizens” removed from the voter rolls in Pinellas County–and celebrated by Governor Scott that his purge is working–were in fact identified by and removed from the list by Supervisor Clark.
Of those 8 individuals removed from the county’s list of voters by the SOE, exactly zero are the April 1, 2012 state voter file. That’s a big fat zero. They are not on the state’s list of registered voters, and thus we don’t know anything about them–their party, their race/ethnicity, their age, their past voting history (if any) and most importantly, whether or not they were citizens and eligible to vote.
Seems par for the course.
As I’ve written before, of the 11.2 million registered voters in the state of Florida, the Florida Secretary of State identified 2,625 “potential noncitizens,” and 41 have been removed from the rolls. And of the 2,625 “potential noncitizens” identified by Governor Scott’s henchmen, there is evidence that perhaps 7 have ever cast a ballot. It remains unclear, however, as to whether or not they were noncitizens (at the time) and thus ineligible to exercise their franchise.
As I’ve said before, Governor Scott’s Voter Purge must come to a complete halt.
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.
Here’s some more information about the 41 (out of the 2,625 people flagged by the FL Secretary of State as being “potential noncitizens”) who ended up being purged from the voter rolls.
Again, that’s 41 registered voters the FL SOS was able to identify and purge as “potential noncitizens,” out of some 11.2 million eligible citizens on Florida’s voter rolls.
So, who are the 41 registered voters who were purged by the FL SOS (out of its list of 2,625 “potential noncitizens”). Of the 41 who were purged, the SOS had no record of 31 of them ever voting. Six 6 were registered in 2008 and 6 were registered in 2010 & 2011. Another 27 were registered to vote between 1990 & 2007. In fact, the FL SOS provided no information on the date when two of the suspected “noncitizens” it identified and subsequently purged where even registered to vote, much less ever voted, in the Sunshine State.
Of the 41 purged “potential noncitizens” identified by the FL SOS, 21 are at least 45 years old, 13 are women, and 21 are from Miami-Dade and Broward counties in south Florida.
Let’s take a closer look at the racial/ethic breakdown of the 1,599 “potential noncitizens” residing in Miami-Dade who were among the 2,625 people targeted by FL SOS. Of those tagged as being a “potential noncitizen,” 1,214 are Hispanic, 152 are black, 75 are white, and 27 are Asian.
In all, the FL SOS purged just 15 of the 2,625 “potential noncitizens” it identified as living in Miami-Dade county. That’s 15 wrongly registered voters out of more than 1.2 million citizens who are registered to vote in the county.
Of the 75 whites & 27 Asians identified as “potential noncitizens” by FL SOS, none were purged from the rolls. Of the 15 who were purged, 2 are African American & 11 are Hispanic.
With respect to the partisanship of the FL SOS’s flawed purge, the Miami-Dade list of “potential noncitizens” included 590 Democrats, 641 NPAs, and 354 Republicans. Five of each were purged from the rolls by the FL SOS for being “potential noncitizens.”
Seems to me that’s an awful lot of false positives — citizens who were wrongly targeted and harassed by the Florida Secretary of State as being “potential noncitizens.”
The illegal purging of Florida’s registered voters must come to an end.
