MJ LEE, POLITICO
A coalition of voter advocacy groups is suing Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner over the state’s controversial effort to purge its voter rolls of non-citizens.
The Advancement Project, Fair Elections Legal Network, LatinoJustice and Project Vote say the state of Florida is violating the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits states from removing voters from its rolls less than 90 days before a federal election. The groups also charge that some 53 percent of those targeted in the state’s purge are Hispanics, which they say is a clear sign that Florida is discriminating against minority voters in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The suit was filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida in Miami.
“This program clearly is using faulty data to purge people from the rolls. Already we’ve seen 500 eligible voters [who were targeted in Florida] show documentation that they are in fact eligible voters,” Josh Spaulding, communications director of the Fair Elections Legal Network, told POLITICO Tuesday morning. “The problem is, once these people get purged from the roll, they might not know until Election Day, and once they’re purged, they can’t have that right to vote restored.”
The mission of the lawsuit, he added, is to ensure that “everybody that’s eligible to vote … and is a legal voter is actually able to cast their ballots.”
The groups allege that database matching programs are “notoriously unreliable.” Judith Browne, co-director of the Advancement Project, called Gov. Rick Scott “shameful” for the voter purge.
“It is shameful that Gov. Scott insists on breaking the law to remove the voting rights of thousands of American citizens clearly for partisan gain,” she said in a statement. “Everyone, no matter what political party they belong to, should oppose attempts to weaken our basic democratic value of ensuring that every American citizen has a right to vote.”
The move comes a week after the Justice Department sued Florida to stop the purge. Scott, meanwhile, said the state would sue the Department of Homeland Security for denying the state access to a citizenship database that it says would help expedite the controversial move. READ MORE