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 Suppression
Florida’s controversial election law, HB 1355, which has restricted early voting, made the casting of provisional ballots more likely, and cracked down on third party voter registration organization (3PVRO) efforts to register eligible Florida citizens, is still making news.
Yesterday, Judge Robert Hinkle, a federal judge in Tallahassee who is presiding over the legal action brought forth by the League of Women Voters and the other plaintiffs challenging the constraints and penalties placed on 3PVROs, took a more definitive step in deep-sixing several provisions of Governor Scott’s signature voter-suppression law, ruling that he intends to issue a permanent injunction as soon as the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismisses the state’s appeal of his preliminary injunction that he issued back on May 31, 2012.
Anecdotal evidence from groups sitting on the sidelines in Florida suggests that the law has indeed dampened voter registration across the state.
But how should we measure such a decrease, if indeed there has been one?
Florida Times-Union reporter, Matt Dixon, tried to measure the impact of the law in a story he wrote earlier this week that has gotten a lot of press, including a reprint of his findings in the New York Times and on Rachel Maddow’s Blog. The headline of his article screams, “Democratic registration all but dries up since new Florida laws.”
But let’s take a closer look at Dixon’s methodology.
According to Dixon’s analysis, between July 1, 2011 and August 1, 2012, the number of registered Democrats statewide increased by only 11,365, compared to increases in Democratic registrations over the 13 months that preceded the 2004 and 2008 elections, which he claims increased an average of 209,425 voters.
Dixon also provides similar numbers of new registrations for Republicans, as show in this chart produced on Maddow’s Blog:
Chart: Florida’s voter-registration collapse
Although voter registration numbers are indeed down in Florida compared with other years, there are serious problems with Dixon’s analysis.
First, it does not measure NEW voters who are registered over the three 13-month periods. Rather, his analysis looks at the differences in aggregate registration numbers for the two parties, which does not hold constant any increases, or (in fact) decreases in the overall number of registered voters in Florida. Furthermore, statewide population had increased prior to the two previous elections, but recently has remained flat, decreasing the overall pool of potential new registrants of either party.
Second, voter registration is a daily, ongoing occurrence, and total number of registered Democrats and Republicans Dixon compares over the three spans does capture the possible impact of HB 1355, which went into effect on July 1, 2011. Indeed, his 13-month time-frame includes two months (June & July 2012) when 3PRVROs in Florida were once again registering voters after Judge Hinkle’s preliminary injunction on May 31, 2012.
A much better way to measure the effects of HB 1355 on voter registration numbers in Florida is to do what Professor Michael Herron and I have done in this paper.
I don’t have time to summarize our results, but perhaps these figures might suffice for now:
As we write on page 19 in our paper,
I’ll certainly have more on this later…
Professor Michael Herron (Dartmouth College) and I have posted a draft of our American Political Science Association annual conference paper, “House Bill 1355 and Voter Registration in Florida,” here.
Here’s the Abstract:
New state laws governing voter registration went into effect in Florida on July 1, 2011. Among the legal changes
promulgated as a consequence of a piece of Florida state legislation known as House Bill 1355 were new registration
requirements for third-party groups like the League of Women Voters and a new oath, warning of prison time and fines,
that voter registration agents had to sign before engaging in registration activities. Such changes raised the implicit
costs that eligible Florida citizens faced when registering to vote, and we show, consistent with this logic, that voter
registrations across Florida in late 2011 dropped precipitously compared to registrations in late 2007. This pattern is
evident among registrants in general, among registrants age 21 and younger, and among the number of individuals
who registered as Democrats as well as the number who registered as Republicans. Outside of House Bill 1355, we
know of no credible explanations for our findings about Florida registration drops in 2011. Our results thus show how
restrictions on the way that third-party organizations register voters can have tangible effects on actual registrations
and, given that registration prior to an election is a civic necessity in Florida, can affect electoral participation.
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.
