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The federal agency on Monday announced its intention to sue the state. It comes the same day that Florida announced it was suing a different federal agency over the purge.
Florida came up with a list that shows that as many as 182,000 registered voters may not be U.S. citizens. Election supervisors have been asked to check a much smaller list.
The database relies on some outdated driver's license information, and a number of the people on the list of possible non-citizens have since proven their citizenship, according to the state's election department. Opponents of the purge argue that the efforts disproportionately targeted Latinos and Democrats.
State officials have been seeking access to a federal immigration database to verify the matches. But that request has been turned down by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security so Florida is suing to gain access.
Federal officials, however, contend the purge violates federal voting laws.
Despite the state's push to continue the voter purge, many of Florida's 67 countiesannounced last Friday they would stop removing voters from the polls.
They tried pulling this bullshit-I mean, they pulled this bullshit, when Bush was running. TWICE. Who's relative is governor, now?
and
and
Local election boards in Florida advised to stop voter 'purge'
UPDATED 4:12 PM EDT Jun 04, 2012
The legal counsel for Florida's local elections officers has recommended all counties in the state stop removing names from their voter rolls after the U.S. Department of Justice questioned the legality of the action.
In a recommendation dated June 1, Ron Labasky, a lawyer for the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, advised all counties to stop the removal of names from the voter rolls until the Justice Department's concerns are resolved.
"I recommend that Supervisors of Elections cease any further action until the issues were raised by the Department of Justice are resolved between the parties or by a Court," Labasky wrote.
The so-called "voter purge" would remove names from Florida's voter rolls months before the 2012 presidential election, when Florida will play a key role as a battleground state with a large chunk of electoral votes.
Florida's move to remove non-eligible voters from its voter lists began after the state's Republican Gov. Rick Scott pressed the state to identify non-U.S. citizens who had registered to vote illegally. Using information from the state's Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, the state identified more than 100,000 names of non-eligible voters that could potentially be on the lists illegally.
Critics say the plan unfairly targets minorities, and paint it as an attempt to dissuade typically Democratic voters from going to the polls.
The Department of Justice wrote in a letter Thursday that Florida failed to properly notify the federal government of their decision, writing the unilateral move violated provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Five counties in Florida are covered by the Voting Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation that gives the federal government open-ended oversight of states and localities with a history of voter discrimination. Any changes in voting laws and procedures in the covered states must be "pre-cleared" with Washington.
In its letter, the Justice Department also s...
The Truth-O-Meter Says:
"In the 2000 Florida election, at least 1,100 eligible voters were wrongly dropped from voting rolls in an attempt to purge a list of felons. Many of those who were dropped showed up to vote and were told they could not."
Bill Nelson on Tuesday, May 29th, 2012 in letter to Gov. Rick Scott
Bill Nelson compares Rick Scott's voter purge with a 2000 attempt
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An effort ordered by Gov. Rick Scott to purge Florida’s voter rolls of noncitizenshad Sen. Bill Nelson feeling a sour case of déjà vu.
Nelson, a Democrat, links the hunt for illegal voters with the 2000 election -- before anyone even uttered the word "recount" -- and Florida’s botched attempt to remove felons from the rolls ahead of election day.
He warned Scott about repeating the ordeal in a May 29, 2012, letter.
"In the 2000 Florida election, at least 1,100 eligible voters were wrongly dropped from voting rolls in an attempt to purge a list of felons," Nelson wrote. "Many of those who were dropped showed up to vote and were told they could not. And in a presidential election decided by 537 votes, that erroneous purge may have been a factor."
PolitiFact Florida wanted to compare the millennial purge with the most recent one, which the Obama administration ordered the state to halt on grounds it violates two voter laws.
We’ll examine the parallels and determine if Nelson offered an accurate recap of the number of voters affected by the infamous 2000 purge.
2000
As part of their 1998 elections reforms, state lawmakers told the Department of State to remove felons and other ineligible voters from the rolls after thousands of corrupt votes, including 100 votes by felons, were cast in a Miami mayoral election.
The agency hired Boca Raton-based DTS Technologies, a subsidiary of ChoicePoint in Atlanta, for about $4 million to produce a list of probable and possible felons before the election. (Unlike most states, in Florida a felon’s civil rights are not restored unless he or she is granted clemency by the governor and Cabinet.)
The company warned the state that many people on the list would not be felons, but officials wanted DTS to use broad parameters -- that meant more felons off the rolls.
People whose names appeared on the list of more than 50,000 names had to prove their innocence or automatically be dropped from the rolls within several weeks of receiving written notice. Twenty counties ignored the state’s directive because they found the data unreliable, including the Madison County elections supervisor, who found her own name among suspected felon voters.
News organizations unearthed numerous accounts of law-abiding citizens turned away at the polls because they could not prove their innocence. Several thousand people appealed to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and half were found to not be felons.
The precise damage is pretty hard to calculate.
"I’ve seen numbers all over the map," said Myrna Perez, senior counsel in the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which is investigating the purge ordered by Scott.
Nelson’s figure comes from a 2001 Palm Beach Post investigation, the crux of which asserts at least 1,100 eligible voters were wrongly purged before the 2000 election -- "the collateral damage from an aggressive and ill-conceived state plan to prevent felons from voting."
The Post’s count included at least 108 citizens who were cleared after the election and 996 people who committed felonies in other states (they were supposed to retain their civil rights even in Florida).
Other tallies put the number of bad targets 11 or 20 times higher.
The NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union sued the state in 2000 partly over the felon voter purge, arguing it disenfranchised black voters. A consent decree from the lawsuit settlement required the state to run its old felon lists with new standards.
The exercise resulted in 12,023 fewer Floridians making the felon list, meaning these people could have been targeted as felons and denied the right to vote, reported theSt. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) in 2003.
Some caveats: This figure does not mean 12,000 people were purged without cause. It means they could have been. Plus, some people within this class might not have been affected anyway because some supervisors decided not to enforce the purge.
A massive story about the 2000 election by Vanity Fair identified 20,000 people who were wrongly included. We don’t know where that number comes from and will update this story if we find out.
Nelson should have used that much bigger figure, said Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho.
"I read the letter from Nelson and I laughed," Sancho said. "How come you didn’t vet this better? You could have had a way bigger number."
We asked the state department for any data it might have but did not hear back.
2012
Twelve years later, Gov. Scott, who campaigned on a platform of cracking down on illegal immigrants, ordered state officials to clear the rolls of noncitizen voters.
The state department whittled a list of 182,000 potential noncitizens to about 2,700 by comparing driver’s license data, which contains some citizenship data, against voter rolls. County supervisors, again, were told to notify those listed by mail of the need to urgently prove their citizenship. And also like last time, some supervisors decided to sit out the purge.
Already, a Pasco County woman and a 91-year-old World War II veteran from Broward County have made headlines for being wrongfully targeted. In fact, elections supervisors found that most names on the list belong to citizens -- probably because the motor vehicle department’s citizenship information is out of date, the Miami Herald reported.
Thirteen Miami-Dade residents have disclosed they are not citizens and ineligible to vote as a result of the purge, the Herald reported. It’s for reasons like this that Republicans stand by the clean-up efforts.
"The implication of Nelson's letter is that eligible voters will not be able to vote, yet there is no evidence of this," said Kristen McDonald, RPOF spokeswoman.
Still, voter-rights advocates and some elections supervisors share Nelson’s ominous sentiment.
"It’s distressing and disheartening that this is happening again in Florida given the history of inaccurate voter purges of the past," Marcia Johnson-Blanco, co-director of the Voting Rights Project, which is a program within the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Rolling Stone waded into the issue with a scathing report, quoting Sancho as saying, "The state’s supervisors of elections are very, very disturbed."
"This was dumped into our laps at the 11th hour. Those of us who have been here long enough get this eerie similarity to the flawed felon databases of 2000 in Florida," he told the magazine.
Our ruling
Nelson precisely cites a Palm Beach Post analysis that put the total number of people wrongfully dropped from the voter rolls in 2000 at about 1,100. Other estimates of wrongful targets are much higher, and experts about the 2000 election tend to go with those. Trouble is, we don’t have exact figures.
However, Nelson’s broader point -- that a significant number of people were wrongly tossed from Florida’s voter rolls -- is valid. And he did say at least.
We rate his statement True.
Nelson, a Democrat, links the hunt for illegal voters with the 2000 election -- before anyone even uttered the word "recount" -- and Florida’s botched attempt to remove felons from the rolls ahead of election day.
He warned Scott about repeating the ordeal in a May 29, 2012, letter.
"In the 2000 Florida election, at least 1,100 eligible voters were wrongly dropped from voting rolls in an attempt to purge a list of felons," Nelson wrote. "Many of those who were dropped showed up to vote and were told they could not. And in a presidential election decided by 537 votes, that erroneous purge may have been a factor."
PolitiFact Florida wanted to compare the millennial purge with the most recent one, which the Obama administration ordered the state to halt on grounds it violates two voter laws.
We’ll examine the parallels and determine if Nelson offered an accurate recap of the number of voters affected by the infamous 2000 purge.
2000
As part of their 1998 elections reforms, state lawmakers told the Department of State to remove felons and other ineligible voters from the rolls after thousands of corrupt votes, including 100 votes by felons, were cast in a Miami mayoral election.
The agency hired Boca Raton-based DTS Technologies, a subsidiary of ChoicePoint in Atlanta, for about $4 million to produce a list of probable and possible felons before the election. (Unlike most states, in Florida a felon’s civil rights are not restored unless he or she is granted clemency by the governor and Cabinet.)
The company warned the state that many people on the list would not be felons, but officials wanted DTS to use broad parameters -- that meant more felons off the rolls.
People whose names appeared on the list of more than 50,000 names had to prove their innocence or automatically be dropped from the rolls within several weeks of receiving written notice. Twenty counties ignored the state’s directive because they found the data unreliable, including the Madison County elections supervisor, who found her own name among suspected felon voters.
News organizations unearthed numerous accounts of law-abiding citizens turned away at the polls because they could not prove their innocence. Several thousand people appealed to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and half were found to not be felons.
The precise damage is pretty hard to calculate.
"I’ve seen numbers all over the map," said Myrna Perez, senior counsel in the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which is investigating the purge ordered by Scott.
Nelson’s figure comes from a 2001 Palm Beach Post investigation, the crux of which asserts at least 1,100 eligible voters were wrongly purged before the 2000 election -- "the collateral damage from an aggressive and ill-conceived state plan to prevent felons from voting."
The Post’s count included at least 108 citizens who were cleared after the election and 996 people who committed felonies in other states (they were supposed to retain their civil rights even in Florida).
Other tallies put the number of bad targets 11 or 20 times higher.
The NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union sued the state in 2000 partly over the felon voter purge, arguing it disenfranchised black voters. A consent decree from the lawsuit settlement required the state to run its old felon lists with new standards.
The exercise resulted in 12,023 fewer Floridians making the felon list, meaning these people could have been targeted as felons and denied the right to vote, reported theSt. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) in 2003.
Some caveats: This figure does not mean 12,000 people were purged without cause. It means they could have been. Plus, some people within this class might not have been affected anyway because some supervisors decided not to enforce the purge.
A massive story about the 2000 election by Vanity Fair identified 20,000 people who were wrongly included. We don’t know where that number comes from and will update this story if we find out.
Nelson should have used that much bigger figure, said Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho.
"I read the letter from Nelson and I laughed," Sancho said. "How come you didn’t vet this better? You could have had a way bigger number."
We asked the state department for any data it might have but did not hear back.
2012
Twelve years later, Gov. Scott, who campaigned on a platform of cracking down on illegal immigrants, ordered state officials to clear the rolls of noncitizen voters.
The state department whittled a list of 182,000 potential noncitizens to about 2,700 by comparing driver’s license data, which contains some citizenship data, against voter rolls. County supervisors, again, were told to notify those listed by mail of the need to urgently prove their citizenship. And also like last time, some supervisors decided to sit out the purge.
Already, a Pasco County woman and a 91-year-old World War II veteran from Broward County have made headlines for being wrongfully targeted. In fact, elections supervisors found that most names on the list belong to citizens -- probably because the motor vehicle department’s citizenship information is out of date, the Miami Herald reported.
Thirteen Miami-Dade residents have disclosed they are not citizens and ineligible to vote as a result of the purge, the Herald reported. It’s for reasons like this that Republicans stand by the clean-up efforts.
"The implication of Nelson's letter is that eligible voters will not be able to vote, yet there is no evidence of this," said Kristen McDonald, RPOF spokeswoman.
Still, voter-rights advocates and some elections supervisors share Nelson’s ominous sentiment.
"It’s distressing and disheartening that this is happening again in Florida given the history of inaccurate voter purges of the past," Marcia Johnson-Blanco, co-director of the Voting Rights Project, which is a program within the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Rolling Stone waded into the issue with a scathing report, quoting Sancho as saying, "The state’s supervisors of elections are very, very disturbed."
"This was dumped into our laps at the 11th hour. Those of us who have been here long enough get this eerie similarity to the flawed felon databases of 2000 in Florida," he told the magazine.
Our ruling
Nelson precisely cites a Palm Beach Post analysis that put the total number of people wrongfully dropped from the voter rolls in 2000 at about 1,100. Other estimates of wrongful targets are much higher, and experts about the 2000 election tend to go with those. Trouble is, we don’t have exact figures.
However, Nelson’s broader point -- that a significant number of people were wrongly tossed from Florida’s voter rolls -- is valid. And he did say at least.
We rate his statement True.
PolitiFact Florida is partnering with 10 News for the 2012 election season. See video fact-checks by clicking here.
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About this statement:
Published: Tuesday, June 5th, 2012 at 4:02 p.m.
Subjects: Elections
Sources:
The Miami Herald Naked Politics blog, ‘Bill Nelson to Rick Scott: Your noncitizen "purge" is a "concern,"’ May 29, 2012
The Miami Herald, "South Florida Democrats say Gov. Rick Scott leading 'misguided' effort to purge voters from state rolls," May 29, 2012
Too Close to Call, Jeffrey Toobin, 2001
Email interview with author Jeffrey Toobin, May 30, 2012
Palm Beach Post, "Felon purge sacrificed innocent voters," May 27, 2001 (via Nexis)
Tampa Bay Times, "One woman's experience in Florida's targeting of noncitizen voters," May 29, 2012
Tampa Bay Times, "Of 7,000 felons purged from voting rolls, many are Democrats, blacks," May 23, 2012
Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald, "State data lead to questions about nearly 2,700 voters," May 10, 2012
Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald, "Noncitizen voter database has flaws, local elections officials say," May 14, 2012
Letter from voting groups to Secretary of State Ken Detzner, via Post on Politics
Interview with Kristen McDonald, RPOF spokeswoman, May 31, 2012
Interview with Marcia Johnson-Blanco, co-director of the Voting Rights Project within the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, May 31, 2012
St. Petersburg Times, "No telling if voter rolls are ready for 2004," Dec. 21, 2003
Interview with Myrna Perez, senior counsel in the democracy program at Brennan Center for Justice, May 31, 2012
Rolling Stone, "Florida GOP takes voter suppression to a brazen new extreme," May 31, 2012
Orlando Sentinel, "State scraps felon voter list," July 11, 2004 (via Nexis)
Tampa Tribune, "Ineligible voter list revives concern," May 18, 2004 (via Nexis)
Harper's Magazine, "Ex-con game: how Florida's "felon" voter-purge was itself felonious,"
March 1, 2002 (via Nexis)
The Miami Herald, "South Florida Democrats say Gov. Rick Scott leading 'misguided' effort to purge voters from state rolls," May 29, 2012
Too Close to Call, Jeffrey Toobin, 2001
Email interview with author Jeffrey Toobin, May 30, 2012
Palm Beach Post, "Felon purge sacrificed innocent voters," May 27, 2001 (via Nexis)
Tampa Bay Times, "One woman's experience in Florida's targeting of noncitizen voters," May 29, 2012
Tampa Bay Times, "Of 7,000 felons purged from voting rolls, many are Democrats, blacks," May 23, 2012
Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald, "State data lead to questions about nearly 2,700 voters," May 10, 2012
Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald, "Noncitizen voter database has flaws, local elections officials say," May 14, 2012
Letter from voting groups to Secretary of State Ken Detzner, via Post on Politics
Interview with Kristen McDonald, RPOF spokeswoman, May 31, 2012
Interview with Marcia Johnson-Blanco, co-director of the Voting Rights Project within the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, May 31, 2012
St. Petersburg Times, "No telling if voter rolls are ready for 2004," Dec. 21, 2003
Interview with Myrna Perez, senior counsel in the democracy program at Brennan Center for Justice, May 31, 2012
Rolling Stone, "Florida GOP takes voter suppression to a brazen new extreme," May 31, 2012
Orlando Sentinel, "State scraps felon voter list," July 11, 2004 (via Nexis)
Tampa Tribune, "Ineligible voter list revives concern," May 18, 2004 (via Nexis)
Harper's Magazine, "Ex-con game: how Florida's "felon" voter-purge was itself felonious,"
March 1, 2002 (via Nexis)
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The Truth-O-Meter Says:
St. Petersburg, Florida -- Tampa Bay is the biggest battleground for the presidential election. So Democrats and Republicans want to make sure every vote counts.
10 News reporter Allison Kropff and PolitiFact Florida look into two statements by politicians on each side of the aisle about those all important votes.
Florida is the state to win in the 2012 election and Republicans and Democrats know every vote counts, which is why there's a great debate over those votes.
We'll start with a statement by Republican Party of Florida Chairman Lenny Curry, "More than 250 groups, ranging across the entire political spectrum, have filed with the state and are registering voters right now."
He's backing third party voter registration changes and he's right on the numbers. PolitiFact Florida actually found 293.
"He's wrong when they say they're registering voters right now, in fact we went and looked at the list and more than half aren't registering voters at all," says Aaron Sharockman with PolitiFact Florida.
Of those on the list, PolitiFact Florida found six registering the vast majority.
Election laws passed in 2011 put requirements on third party groups giving them only 48 hours to turn them in or get fined. A federal judge declared that law unconstitutional last week.
PolitiFact Florida rates Curry's statement: HALF TRUE.
Now to Senator Bill Nelson comparing Governor Rick Scott's attempt at purging non-citizen voters from the voter rolls to the 2000 attempt at purging felons.
In a letter to the Governor, Senator Nelson says the noncitizen purge is a "concern". "In the 2000 Florida election, at least 1,100 eligible voters were wrongly dropped from voting rolls in an attempt to purge a list of felons. Many of those who were dropped showed up to vote and were told they could not."
"They hired a company out of state who went on this crusade to try to find felons across the state who are not legally able to vote. They came up with a huge list, but their list was inaccurate. For instance, it included people who weren't felons, it included people who are felons that are potentially out of state and it wrongly included people who weren't felons at all," says Sharockman.
Senator Nelson says at least 1,100 were wrongly dropped from the rolls. PolitiFact Florida found numbers as high as 12,000, but there are no exact figures.
PolitiFact Florida rates Nelson's statement: TRUE
To read more about these fact checks, click here:http://www.politifact.com/florida/.
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