Florida: Voting Rights Decision Could Mean Return of Florida’s Voter Purge | Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Until Congress is able to come up with new voting rights rules, states could give some of their most controversial voting laws a second life. The U.S. Senate today is discussing the Supreme Court’s decision to throw out a section of the Voting Rights Act. That section established a formula that determined which counties nationwide would be required to clear voting laws with the federal government before implementing them. Five counties in Florida fell under that part of the civil rights-era law. However, Congress is only beginning to discuss a possible replacement of the section. Today’s Senate hearing, according to MSNBC, “will feature testimony from VRA backers in the House and some prominent VRA opponents.”

Florida: Democrat says Scott not pursuing voter registration fraud linked to GOP | Tampa Bay Times

Is Gov. Rick Scott covering up GOP voter registration fraud? The future leader of the House Democrats thinks perhaps he is and is asking Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford to hold legislative hearings on what he says could be an attempt by Scott to “stifle” a criminal investigation. “I have been following the many news media reports about rampant fraud regarding voter registration drives associated with the company Strategic Allied Consulting and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation that was tasked by Gov. Rick Scott some months ago,” states a letter that Rep. Darryl Rouson, D-St. Petersburg, sent out Tuesday afternoon.

Florida: New voting equipment checking in for Brevard County | Florida Today

Brevard County voters will be using new equipment starting in November. The County Commission this week unanimously approved the $1.5 million purchase. Supervisor of Elections Lori Scott said Brevard currently has among the oldest election equipment in the state, dating back to 1999. Brevard was one of the early adopters that year of “optical scan technology” to read the ballots. She says that equipment now is “aging and outdated,” and the vendor that made it is out of business, so spare parts are difficult to come by. “We can’t continue to limp through like that,” Scott said. With the new equipment, voters will continue to mark a paper ballot. But the new equipment that will collect and tabulate those ballots will make it easier for election workers to spot any problems with improperly completed ballots. “This is a much more user-friendly unit,” Scott said.

Florida: Counties reorganize precincts to help reduce voting lines | Miami Herald

Broward and Miami-Dade elections officials are reorganizing hundreds of voting precincts with the goal of reducing the long lines of voters that plagued last November’s presidential elections and embarrassed the state. In Broward, Brenda Snipes, the county supervisor of elections, started the process in June, aiming to complete the work by September — more than a year in advance of the 2014 gubernatorial election. In Miami-Dade, the county’s elections office expects to present a new precinct plan to county commissioners in early 2014, spokeswoman Christina White said. In Broward, Snipes is an elected officer, so county commissioners don’t have to approve her plan and she has no immediate plans for public input. Miami-Dade had planned on reorganizing its precincts before the 2012 election, but delayed it out of a concern that voters assigned to new precincts would be confused on a presidential election day. Instead, voters at many precincts stood in line for several hours to wait to vote. Both counties, which have more than 1 million voters each, have about 800 precincts. Some are combined in the same location.

Florida: State asks federal court to dismiss voting rights suit | Bradenton Herald

When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act last month, it cleared the way for Gov. Rick Scott’s administration to resume its controversial effort to remove potential noncitizens from voter rolls. The high court June 25 invalidated a formula used for decades by federal officials to approve changes to voting laws in states and counties to protect minorities from discrimination, a review known as preclearance. The federal scrutiny no longer applies to Monroe and four other Florida counties: Hillsborough, Collier, Hardee and Hendry. A Hispanic advocacy group, Mi Familia Vota Education Fund, sued last year on behalf of two Tampa voters, calling the state’s list of suspected non-U.S. citizen voters unreliable with a potential to disenfranchise voters, especially Hispanics and African-Americans such as Murat Limage, 45, of Tampa. He received a letter from the county elections office that questioned his citizenship, even though he was a naturalized U.S. citizen, the suit alleges. Some county election supervisors also questioned the accuracy of the state data. Removal efforts stalled a few weeks before the 2012 general election.

Florida: State Supreme Court rules against Legislature in redistricting case | Tampa Bay Times

The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday handed a legal setback to the state Legislature, ruling that a legal challenge to the remapping of Senate districts can go forward in a lower court. The 5-2 decision is a victory for the League of Women Voters of Florida, which is seeking to prove that the GOP Senate majority drew districts in violation of the two “fair districts” amendments to the state Constitution that prohibit favoritism toward incumbents or political parties. The Legislature was seeking a “writ of prohibition” from the state’s highest court, based on the argument that the Supreme Court has “exclusive jurisdiction” over any redistricting challenge. Had the court adopted that view, it would have short-circuited the legal action by the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, the National Council of La Raza and seven individually-named voters. The 47-page opinion, written by Justice Barbara Pariente,rejected the Legislature’s arguments on at least six separate grounds. Justices said their initial 30-day review of the maps in 2012, as required by the Constitution, was a “facial” review based on limited evidence before the court. “Our facial review left open the possibility of future fact-intensive claims and did not preclude the future discovery or development of evidence,” Pariente wrote.

Florida: Miami-Dade should take steps to thwart absentee-ballot fraudsters, advisory group says | Miami Herald

Members of a group advising Miami-Dade on how to improve its elections want the county to try get ahead of the curve of fraudsters who have attempted to manipulate the system by submitting phantom absentee-ballot requests online. “Folks are always going to try to figure out weaknesses in the system in order to sway it to their advantage,” County Commissioner Dennis Moss, one of the group’s members, said at a meeting Wednesday. The elections department, he said, should work proactively to foresee where would-be computer hackers might try to attack next. They have already attempted one scheme: submitting thousands of phony ballot requests online for unsuspecting voters. More than 2,500 such requests were flagged by the department last summer because they originated from only a handful of Internet Protocol addresses.

Florida: Election officials share suggestions | Miami Herald

Florida election officials told a presidential commission Friday that a reduction in early voting hours, a limited number of polling sites and a lengthy ballot led to the long lines and counting delays last November that again put the Sunshine State under national scrutiny. Gathered at the University of Miami, Florida’s secretary of state and a panel of a half-dozen county election supervisors spent hours performing a post-mortem of last year’s election before a bipartisan commission charged by President Barack Obama with improving the country’s electoral process. The day-long hearing was the first of four such events in battleground states. Miami was ground zero for Florida’s voting problems: Some voters waited between five and eight hours to cast ballots.

Florida: Online ballot fraud marks the ‘e-boletera era of Miami politics’ | Miami Herald

The election scandal dogging Congressman Joe Garcia’s campaign and two state House races makes it clear: Computer techies are supplementing old-school, block-walking ballot-brokers known as boleteras. Over just a few days last July, at least two groups of schemers used computers traced to Miami, India and the United Kingdom to fraudulently request the ballots of 2,046 Miami-Dade voters. Garcia said he knew nothing of the plot that recently implicated three former campaign workers, two employed in his congressional office. Investigators, meanwhile, have hit a dead end with a larger fraud involving two state House races. A third incident cropped up Thursday in Miami’s mayoral race, but the case appears unrelated to last year’s fraud when two groups appeared to act separately from each other. They employed different tactics to target different types of voters, a University of Florida/Miami Herald analysis of election data indicates. The ultimate goal was the same: get mail-in ballots into the hands of voters, a job that many boleteras once handled on the streets of Miami-Dade. Now, it’s electronic.

Florida: Police raid Miami Commissioner Francis Suarez’s mayoral campaign in absentee ballot fraud investigation | Miami Herald

Detectives raided a political worker’s home Thursday after he submitted other voters’ absentee-ballot request forms to help Miami Commissioner Francis Suarez’s mayoral campaign, which spun into damage-control mode and said no one intentionally broke the law. The Miami-Dade state attorney’s office targeted Juan Pablo Baggini after county elections workers flagged a series of 20 absentee-ballot requests made on May 29 that were linked to Baggini’s computer. “I can’t say anything, it’s an ongoing investigation,” Baggini, 37, said at his Coconut Grove office. He is listed as the “operations director’’ for Suarez’s campaign. The raid at Baggini’s Continental Park home was the second performed by police and prosecutors since May 31, when investigators searched three locations in a separate absentee-ballot fraud case involving the 2012 campaign of U.S. Rep. Joe Garcia.

Florida: Obama’s bipartisan election commission to hold Miami meeting | Miami Herald

The bipartisan election-reform commission established by President Obama will meet for a day in Miami — the focal point for the state’s most-recent election meltdown. The Presidential Commission on Election Administration is scheduled to meet all day Friday, June 28 at the University of Miami to take testimony and public comments from local, county and state election officials and citizens, a notice published Wednesday in the Federal Register said. “The [commission] was established to identify best practices and make recommendations to the President on the efficient administration of elections in order to ensure that all eligible voters have the opportunity to cast their ballots without undue delay,” the notice said, “and to improve the experience of voters facing other obstacles in casting their ballots.”

Florida: Congressman Joe Garcia’s chief of staff implicated in phantom absentee-ballot requests scheme | Miami Herald

Congressman Joe Garcia’s chief of staff abruptly resigned Friday after being implicated in a sophisticated scheme to manipulate last year’s primary elections by submitting hundreds of fraudulent absentee-ballot requests. Friday afternoon, Garcia said he had asked Jeffrey Garcia, no relation, for his resignation after the chief of staff — also the congressman’s top political strategist — took responsibility for the plot. Hours earlier, law enforcement investigators raided the homes of another of Joe Garcia’s employees and a former campaign aide in connection with an ongoing criminal investigation into the matter. “I’m shocked and disappointed about this,” Garcia, who said he was unaware of the scheme, told The Miami Herald. “This is something that hit me from left field. Until today, I had no earthly idea this was going on.”

Florida: Electronic poll book could help with voting problems | News4

It’s no secret elections Florida have been coming under fire, with long lines, questionable ballots and the time it takes to check if someone is eligible to vote. Now a machine called an electronic poll book could help solve some of that. It’s already used in early voting to verify a voter. Duval County Supervisor of Elections Jerry Holland said he would like to see them in every county precinct on Election Day. He said it will benefit voters in many ways. “Plus, it takes away one of the possibilities that voters can vote twice, which currently today with paper registers they can go from one precinct to the next and vote twice and get away with it Election Day,” Holland said. “The electronic poll book negates that because they are interconnected.”

Florida: Congressman Joe Garcia: ‘Flawed’ absentee-voting system, ‘reckless abandon’ in politics contributed to ballot scandal | Miami Herald

Congressman Joe Garcia on Saturday attempted to control the damage inflicted on his office a day earlier, when he dismissed his chief of staff for apparently orchestrating a scheme to submit hundreds of fraudulent absentee-ballot requests. Meanwhile, Republicans nationwide and closer to home pummeled Garcia, questioning whether the first-term congressman was coming clean on his campaign’s involvement in the ballot scandal. In a news conference held at his West Miami-Dade office Saturday morning, Garcia, a Democrat, maintained that he had no knowledge of the failed plot during last year’s primary election. He said he learned about his campaign’s involvement only the previous afternoon from chief of staff Jeffrey Garcia, who is unrelated to the congressman and has long served as his top political strategist. “I cannot stress how angry I am at these events,” Joe Garcia said Saturday.

Florida: Election Reform In Florida: Is The Conversation Over? | WFSU

Governor Rick Scott has signed Florida’s new elections reform bill into law, but will that solve the problems that arose during last year’s Presidential election? Some say yes, but others say there’s more work to do stop long lines at the polls and protect the state from further embarrassment. Last year, Florida encountered a lot of problems during the 2012 presidential election from counting delays to long lines at the polls. “You shouldn’t have to wait four or five days after the election to know who won the electoral votes from the state of Florida. We shouldn’t be yellow when everyone else is red or blue. We should be able to get that right. You shouldn’t have to wait for six hours to vote,” said House Speaker Will Weatherford following a Work Plan Tour in Tampa.

Florida: Secretary of State praises new election law | First Coast News

Florida’s top elections official said he believes Florida’s new election law will solve the problems that plagued the presidential election last year. Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner praises the law as a bipartisan effort that included contributions and support from Republicans, Democrats, supervisors of elections and the Florida League of Women Voters. The reforms eliminate many of the provisions in Florida’s previous election law that contributed to long lines and frustrated voters.

Florida: Florida Enacts Election Law to Ease Long Voter Lines | Governing.org

Gov. Rick Scott has finished the fix of the flawed election law that relegated Florida to a late-night joke in 2012 by signing an elections clean-up bill passed on the final day of the legislative session. The measure, signed by Scott late Monday before he left for a trade mission to Chile, reverses several provisions implemented in 2011 by GOP lawmakers in anticipation of the 2012 presidential election. Those changes, criticized by Democrats as an attempt to suppress votes for President Barack Obama, limited the early voting that the president’s campaign capitalized on in 2008. The 2011 law also prevented early voting on the Sunday before Election Day and prohibited voters, particularly students, from changing their voting address at the polls. Scott, who had previously signed the 2011 bill into law and refused to use his executive powers to extend early voting in 2012 despite numerous requests, acknowledged the system needed a fix.

Florida: Appeals court shields lawmakers from testifying, showing draft maps in redistricting lawsuit | OrlandoSentinel.com

A divided appeals court ruled Wednesday that Florida legislators should not be questioned under oath about whether they “intended” to gain partisan advantage when they re-drew congressional maps last year. Two sets of groups have challenged the lines for Florida’s 27 U.S. House seats, including some voting-rights groups such as the Florida League of Women Voters, the National Council of La Raza, Common Cause and others. The legal fight is one front of multi-pronged litigation against both the congressonal and state Senate maps lawmakers re-drew following the 2010 U.S. Census.

Florida: Gov. Rick Scott signs elections bill to fix long voter lines | Miami Herald

Gov. Rick Scott has finished the fix of the flawed election law that relegated Florida to a late-night joke in 2012 by signing an elections clean-up bill passed on the final day of the legislative session. The measure, signed by Scott late Monday before he left for a trade mission to Chile, reverses several provisions implemented in 2011 by GOP lawmakers in anticipation of the 2012 presidential election. Those changes, criticized by Democrats as an attempt to suppress votes for President Barack Obama, limited the early voting that the president’s campaign capitalized on in 2008. The 2011 law also prevented early voting on the Sunday before Election Day and prohibited voters, particularly students, from changing their voting address at the polls.

Florida: North Miami mayoral candidates dispute ballot count | Miami Herald

Three days after the North Miami election, at least two mayoral candidates are calling into question the results, saying Miami-Dade’s Elections Department can’t account for some seven hundred absentee ballots that were cast. But the elections department said that was not true. All ballots have been counted, and the candidates are mistaken because of a clerical error, a spokesperson said. According to unofficial results, including absentee ballots and all precincts reporting, the mayoral race and two council seats are headed to a runoff between the top two vote-getters because no candidate received more than 50 percent of the vote to win outright. At a press conference Friday afternoon, Dr. Smith Joseph, who came in third place in the mayoral race, called into question the numbers provided to him by the elections department on May 6.

Florida: No. 1 in barring ex-prisoners from voting | Action News

Florida leads the nation by a wide margin in the number of felons who have served their sentences but cannot vote. One of only 11 states in the U.S. that does not automatically return civil rights to former inmates, Florida had not restored the rights of 1.3 million former inmates as of 2010, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based nonprofit that favors alternatives to incarceration. The next closest state was Virginia at 351,943. A policy introduced by Gov. Rick Scott and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi makes most former convicts wait years before they can apply to restore their rights, which include serving on a jury and holding public office. Critics say the policy disproportionately affects minorities — 60 percent of Florida’s prison population — and cost thousands the ability to vote in 2012. But Scott and Bondi say felons must demonstrate a crime-free life after prison before regaining their civil rights.

Florida: Notes kept by accused Miami-Dade ballot broker reveal details | Miami Herald

Deisy Pentón de Cabrera kept meticulous notes on hundreds of voters, several political campaigns between 2008 and 2012 and what appear to be payments of $50 to $1,300 that are not on any candidate’s financial reports. Detectives confiscated three notebooks in which she wrote this and other information last summer. Finally, nine months after her arrest for alleged ballot fraud in Hialeah, the notebooks have been presented as evidence in the case. Cabrera, 57, wrote in a shaky hand and used abbreviations that are difficult to decipher. But her notes shed some light on the busy workload of this accused ballot broker, or boletera:

Florida: Miami-Dade GOP candidates told to avoid using ballot brokers | Miami Herald

The head of the Republican Party of Miami Dade County said on Monday that all local candidates under his wing will be given strict guidelines to avoid using ballot brokers in their campaigns. “The party will not employ people to collect absentee ballots,” said chairman Nelson Díaz. “We can’t allow people to take advantage of voters and fill out their absentee ballots.” Diaz’s announcement came as a response to stories published by El Nuevo Herald over the weekend about the contents of three notebooks that were apparently kept by Deisy Pentón de Cabrera, who was charged last summer with ballot fraud in Hialeah.

Florida: A non-partisan election option | HeraldTribune.com

A group of concerned citizens has a question for Sarasota County voters: How would you like your local elections — partisan or nonpartisan? The group, Open Our Elections, is launching a petition drive aimed at amending the Sarasota County Charter to provide for nonpartisan elections for all elected county offices, including the County Commission. Open Our Elections’ goal is to gather nearly 14,000 signatures of registered county voters, enough to have the question put to voters in a special election and, if approved, have a nonpartisan provision in place for the November 2014 general election.

Florida: Local election officials applaud election law changes | Northwest Florida Daily News

Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Paul Lux is tickled that the Florida Legislature voted this year to give him and his peers across the state flexibility in establishing early voting hours. He’s also flabbergasted it took a decade to do so. “I’m very pleased, finally. We’ve only been asking for flexibility for about the last 10 years,” Lux said. Two years ago, Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill that cut the number of early voting days from 14 to eight, a move that led to long lines and waits at polling places in many areas.

Florida: Dolphins Vote Won’t Count But Will Be Counted | CBS Miami

Nearly 60,000 people voted absentee or early on whether the Miami Dolphins should get tourist taxes for a major facelift of Sun Life Stadium. But the legislature nixed the deal last Friday when the Speaker Will Weatherford, a Pasco County Republican, refused to allow it to be brought up. The election in Miami-Dade was called off as of the end of the day Friday. So what would become of all those votes? Would they be counted, revealed, thrown out? At Miami-Dade Elections headquarters there was confusion. No one could recall an election – already underway – being cancelled. Elections officials waffled. The ballots might be kept secret. They might be released. They might be destroyed. Mayor Carlos Gimenez put an end to the confusion Tuesday in an interview with CBS4′s Gary Nelson.

Florida: Federal Election Commission Fines 3 Three For Buchanan Campaign Contributions | The Ledger

The Federal Election Commission has fined three men and two Tampa companies a total of $16,000 for illegal campaign contributions to U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Sarasota. The FEC’s case was prompted by a 2009 Tampa Bay Times story about contributions made in the name of Terry Keith Howell, a registered Democrat who was bankrupt when he gave $8,800 to Buchanan. The money actually came from Howell’s business partners in violation of a federal law that bans third-party contributions. Howell ” was concerned about the appearance of his contribution because Howell was a Democrat but was contributing to the Republicans at a time when he didn’t have any money,” according to a report by the FEC’s general counsel.

Florida: Lawmakers Approve Overhaul of State’s Problem-Ridden Voting Process | New York Times

Six months after Florida became the butt of late-night jokes for a chaotic voting process that bedeviled the 2012 presidential election, the State Legislature passed a bill on Friday to remedy many of those problems. Gov. Rick Scott and Republican lawmakers made overhauling the election system a priority this year. Their push to change the law — a redo on a much-criticized bill passed in 2011 — was a response to waits of hours by voters in several counties and a flawed early voting program.

Florida: Marco Rubio gets Florida Legislature to eliminate early primary in 2016 | Miami Herald

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio persuaded state lawmakers to make a last-minute change eliminating Florida’s early presidential primary – a race in which the Republican could be on the ballot. Rubio’s main concern was shared by lawmakers and operatives from both parties: Ensuring that Florida’s 2016 primary vote counts. The measure, barely discussed, was tucked in an election-reform bill that passed the Legislature by wide margins Friday. Right now, the Sunshine State’s early primary violates Democratic and Republican national party rules, which penalizes the state by severely devaluing the vote of its delegation to nominate each party’s presidential candidate.

Florida: Elections bill to fix long voter lines stalls over Miami-Dade elections office | Miami Herald

Embarrassed by an elections meltdown, lawmakers headed to the Florida Capitol this year with a pledge to undo a law that helped lead to long lines, angry voters and jeers about “Flori-duh.” But the elections clean-up bill that the House passed on the very first day of the legislative session has yet to pass the Legislature as the last day dawns. Lawmakers overwhelmingly support the plan to reverse a 2011 election law by expanding the number of early voting sites and days. The bill also gives people a chance to correct an absentee ballot they forgot to sign and would make it easier to prosecute people caught with multiple absentee ballots. But there’s a major hang-up between the House and Senate: a plan to punish election supervisors deemed ineffective and “noncompliant” with the state’s election code.