Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Florida Democratic Party Chair Allison Tant said it was pure politics that was driving Gov. Rick Scott to push for a second purge of non-citizens from voter rolls. “What I say to Rick Scott is if your victory depends on a voter purge, then you’re not fit to govern and you don’t deserve a second term,” Wasserman Schultz said. “This is all about suppressing minority voters and shows how out of touch he is,” Tant said. The comments were made during a Thursday morning conference call with reporters about two hours before Scott’s Secretary of State, Ken Detzner, held the first of five public meetings with supervisors of elections and voters from around the state to discuss how the next purge will be conducted. A first attempt to remove non-citizens last year was impaired by faulty data that disqualified some eligible voters while identifying few actual non-citizens. The state’s list of suspected non-citizens shrank from 182,000 to 198 before supervisors suspended their searches, blaming shoddy data.
Voters misidentified in that initial purge were sent letters informing them: “You are not a United States citizen, however you are registered to vote.”
On Wednesday, Detzner took the blame for the initial purge, saying the state used flawed data from the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. The second purge, he said, will rely on more accurate data, this time from SAVE, which is short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. Although maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, SAVE is a database used by numerous other agencies to determine the immigration status of benefit applicants so only those eligible receive them.
He also said each of the state’s 67 supervisor of elections will oversee the process of notifying any voters identified as non-citizens and giving them time to prove they are eligible.
Full Article: Dems say Scott’s latest voter purge driven by politics | Naked Politics.