pinion Voter Purge Brings More Dark Days to the Sunshine State

Starting with the embarrassing events of the 2000 presidential election and continuing almost unabated since, Florida officials have demonstrated what can only be either a sinister attempt to shade elections through deliberately flawed, outcome-based policies, or a prolific level of incompetence when it comes to participating in federal elections. Whatever the reason, our inability to conduct fair elections has continued to undermine faith in democracy, whenever Florida is involved.

Governor Rick Scott is certainly correct in asserting that ineligible voters should not be allowed to participate in elections. However, the highly-dubious methods which he is using to solve a problem that he has failed to prove exists casts doubt on his intentions. There is no evidence that voter fraud has been anything more than a blip on the radar in our state, yet there is considerable evidence that voter suppression has not only been a problem, but a coordinated policy by a broad group of officials over a long period of time.

In each of the last three presidential elections, the state has been caught employing practices that do not pass the smell test. This phenomenon started in 2000. Then Secretary of State Katherine Harris used a flaw-ridden program designed by ChoicePoint, a private corporation with deep Republican ties, to scrub the state's voter rolls. The error-rate of voters taken from the rolls was unthinkably high.

Investigative reporting by the Guardian's Gregory Palast (extensively detailed in the book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy) later revealed that the state had instructed the company to cast a much wider net than even it recommended in terms of the bare minimum match criteria – leading to scenarios where a guy named Michael Johnson could be scrubbed because a guy named Michael John had committed a felony when he lived in Detroit – even though Michael Johnson lived in Florida his entire life and had never even been arrested. We now know that thousands of Floridians were erroneously denied their right to vote in 2000, a presidential election that was decided by 537 votes – in Florida.

In 2000, the purge focused on felons. Florida was among three states that still revoked a felon's right to vote for life, a policy that goes all the way back to the Jim Crow laws of the post-Civil War reconstruction period. By lowering the match standard (percent of matches on DOB, SSN, race, state of birth, etc.) for identifying a supposed felon, shading the purge with factors indicating who a person was more likely to vote for (93 percent of African Americans voted for Gore) and getting some help from fortuitous mistakes (Bush's home state of Texas provided a list that – oops – contained 8,000 misdemeanor offenders listed as felons), the felon voter purge likely had a much bigger impact than hanging chads, butterfly ballots and ineligible military votes combined in delivering Florida to George Bush.

In 2004, the state again focused on felons in a massive purge effort, despite a 2002 settlement with the NAACP (who'd sued over the 2000 purge). Florida initially attempted to keep the purge list secret. After it was released by court order, the list was found to contain mostly Democrats and a disproportionate number of minorities. Various media outlets showed that the list again included thousands of errors (including voters who were improperly purged in 2000 and had still not been restored). Fortunately, the ensuing embarrassment forced the state to abandon its attempt to use the flawed list.

In September of 2008, then Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning instructed election officials to reject voter registration applications that failed an error-prone computer match process, violating the same 90-day provision. In the first three weeks, 15 percent of registrations were bounced. Election officials were able to catch and correct obvious typos in about 3/4 of the cases. Analysis of the list revealed that African Americans made up 39 percent of blocked voters and Latinos made up 34 percent.

The current voter purge was originated under Scott's direction by Browning, who Scott reappointed in 2011 (previously appointed by Gov. Crist, he'd served from 2006-10). Browning, again citing no actual evidence of fraud, developed the purge strategy, but says he knew it was nowhere near ready to pass muster when he resigned in February of 2012. When you consider that Browning's previous job was with the Koch-funded PAC, Save Our Vote, who seem to exist solely in order to support such purges and lend opposition to fair redistricting, you again can't help but think that the process is outcome-based, rather than problem driven – a suspicion that would be confirmed by the Miami Herald's report of how partisan the results have been.

Once Browning was gone, Governor Scott and the Secretary's replacement, Ken Detzner, fast-tracked the program, sending out a list of almost 2,700 names, and though the Governor claims that they've discovered a whopping 50 ineligible people who have cast ballots, more than 500 on the list have been found to be eligible voters. That's one illegal vote for every 10 voters erroneously scrubbed and a small enough number to prove how insignificant the ”epidemic“ actually is. Should those 50 people be removed? Absolutely – but is it a big enough problem to potentially alienate 500 voters? I should think not.

Those 500 voters and the thousands who are incorrectly absent because of previous felon purges, should not have to jump through hoops in less than 90 days to ”reinstate“ a right they were born with, nor should they have to cast ”provisional“ ballots because the notification was lost in the mail, sent to the wrong address, etc. There is a reason that federal law prevents states from scrubbing voter roles right before an election, and too often that reason has been personified by our state's exploits.

Such purges should be done in the public eye, so that they can be held to the utmost scrutiny. The obviously flawed process being attempted now had begun in secret early last year, but the first word to the public only came this May, with very little details of how the scrub information was being compiled or verified. As we learned, there was good reason for this.

If Rick Scott wants to make sure that his perceived epidemic is solved, then he should get started November 7 when there will be plenty of time for a thorough and comprehensive approach that follows the rule of law and spares American citizens from being harassed in the sort of way we'd expect to see in third world pseudo-democracies run by fascist dictators. There should be bipartisan involvement in designing the process – all of which should be conducted in the sunshine – and voting rights groups should have the opportunity to weigh in at public hearings to voice concerns over the use of flawed data, like cross-indexing databases known to have high rates of error.

An election should be won by the party that a majority of voters believe to be in possession of the best ideas and most capable of executing them – regardless if the people in power agree. When plutocrats begin to convince themselves that the crowded masses are incapable of deciding what's best and that elections are semi-necessary inconveniences to be tolerated, so long as they produce the desired outcome, it is a precursor to the sort of fascism that has too often thwarted democratic rule on this planet.

The United States hails itself a beacon of democracy, and has been too willing to cite an absence of free and open elections as reason to ”liberate“ other peoples via armed conflict. The hypocrisy of employing these sort of shenanigans in our own elections, should go against everything we purport to hold dear, and Floridians should be good and tired of providing an example as to why every voter in the United States has a right to be skeptical of electoral results in what we call the freest nation on Earth, so long as our state is involved in the process.

Dennis Maley is a featured columnist and editor for The Bradenton Times. His column appears every Thursday and Sunday on our site and in our free Weekly Recap and Sunday Edition (click here to subscribe). An archive of Dennis' columns is available here. He can be reached at dennis.maley@thebradentontimes.com. You can also follow Dennis on Facebook and Twitter by clicking the badges below.

Dennis Maley