You Want Numbers? Florida Secretary of State Voter Purge Netted 10 “Potential Noncitizens” who may have Voted

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.

EXCLUSIVE: Was Peter Schorsch (aka @SaintPetersBlog) Purged by the Florida Secretary of State?

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.

WOKV’s Gene Wexler interview on Florida’s voter purge

The Failed Florida Secretary of State’s Voter Purge EXCLUSIVE

I’ve finally had time to crunch some numbers…

Between April 11 and June 7, 107 residents in 15 of the state’s 67 counties were removed from the state’s voter rolls on account of being “potential noncitizens.”  That’s roughly 0.00096% of the 11.2 million people currently registered to vote in the Sunshine State.

(Some perspective on the numbers: In the 2008 General Election, some 1,774 voters in Miami-Dade County alone mailed absentee ballots to the Supervisor of Elections, but they were rejected by the county canvassing board.  Another 833 voters, out of the thousands of voters in Miami-Dade County who had to cast provisional ballots in the 2008 presidential election, never had their votes counted.)

But back to the ongoing voter purge in Florida…

According to data I received through a recent public records request from Chris Cate, the spokesman for Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner, of the 107 registered voters in Florida who were removed from the voting rolls by the Florida Division of Elections, more than a third were purged on May 4, 2012.

Here’s a Table with the date and the number of registered voters who were removed by the Florida SOS.

DATE REMOVED

Freq.

4/11/2012	1
4/17/2012	1
4/18/2012	1
4/19/2012	1
4/24/2012	1
4/25/2012	1
4/30/2012	1
5/2/2012	1
5/3/2012	1
5/4/2012	40
5/7/2012	1
5/8/2012	4
5/9/2012	1
5/11/2012	5
5/12/2012	2
5/13/2012	4
5/15/2012	7
5/16/2012	1
5/17/2012	4
5/21/2012	2
5/23/2012	2
5/29/2012	4
5/30/2012	2
5/31/2012	4
6/1/2012	1
6/4/2012	6
6/5/2012	1
6/7/2012	4
6/11/2012	1
6/12/2012	1
6/13/2012	1

TOTAL

107

And as I’ve mentioned before, it is particularly striking that little old Lee County (yep, you guessed it — it was named for Confederate General Robert E. Lee) accounted for more than 41% (44/107) of the suspected noncitizens who were purged from the voter rolls.  As Miami Herald journalist  Marc Caputo reported, Lee County (along with Collier County) continued “with the program of purging potential noncitizens if they fail to respond to the counties’ requests to proof citizenship” long after the other counties halted the purge because the Florida Secretary of State’s pared-down list of 2,625 “potential noncitizens” was flawed and widely discredited.

Indeed, of the 44 registered voters in Lee County that the state removed from the voter file, only two were on the list of 13 potential noncitizens that the Secretary of State sent to Lee County elections officials.

The astounding inaccuracy of the state’s list of 2,625 “potential noncitizens” was quite consistent across the other counties.

Only 41 registered voters residing in 13 counties–this is out of the 2,625 names flagged by the Florida SOS as “potential noncitizens”–were removed from the rolls.

In other words, 98.4% of the 2,625 people identified by the Florida SOS as “potential noncitizens” remain on the rolls because the Supervisors of Elections found insufficient evidence that they were ineligible to be registered voters.

The other 66 individuals who were purged from the state’s rolls were identified by eight county SOEs (Collier, Miami-Dade, Indian River, Lee, Martin, Okaloosa, Palm Beach, and Pinellas), independent of the Florida SOS’s blemished list of “potential noncitizens.”

Some list.

Are Florida voters in Lee County being disenfranchised because they tried to avoid jury duty?

It’s possible.

According to data supplied to me today from Chris Cate, spokesperson for the Florida Secretary of State, between April 11, 2012 and June 14, 2012, 107 people have been removed from the state’s voter rolls on account of being a suspected noncitizen.  As an aside, that’s roughly 0.00095536% of the 11.2 million people currently registered to vote in the Sunshine State.

Of those removed from the voter rolls for being suspected noncitizens, 86 were excised between April 11 and June 8; an additional 21 people were purged the following week.

Residents living in Lee County accounted for more than 41% (44/107) of those purged from the voter rolls.  A recent story by Marc Caputo of the Miami Herald reported that Lee County (along with Collier County) apparently were “continuing with the program of purging potential noncitizens if they fail to respond to the counties’ requests to proof citizenship.”

What’s surprising, though, is the fact that the office of the Florida Secretary of State–in its flawed, and widely discredited effort to identify noncitizens–only provided the Lee County Supervisor of Elections, Sharon Harrington, the names of 13 potential noncitizens.  That’s 13 names of potential noncitizens from the state’s pared-down list of 2,625 names that the Division of Elections sent to the state’s 67 local elections officials back in May.

According to my analysis of the data, of the 44 registered voters in Lee County that the state has removed from the voter file, only two were on the state’s list of 13 potential noncitizens.

So, how did Lee County officials determine on their own that 42 other individuals on the voter rolls were supposedly noncitzens? Did they have access to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s elusive SAVE database?

Hardly.

According to Caputo, Lee County’s SOE Harrington evidently decided to purge voters from her list after “a local television station compared the voter files with the names of people who got out of jury service by saying they were noncitizens.”

Seriously?

While I certainly don’t condone fibbing to get out of jury duty, it’s troubling that Lee County is apparently using statements made by individuals to avoid jury duty to establish whether or not they are U.S. citizens.  It’s not uncommon for people to lie to avoid serving on a jury.  And those who are caught doing so, face severe penalties.

But should they also be disenfranchised?