Florida: The hunt for non-citizen Florida voters exposes partisan divide | MiamiHerald.com

Amid an increasingly partisan dog fight, Florida elections officials say the number of potential non-citizens they’re examining on the state voter rolls is 180,000, a figure far higher than what was initially reported. Florida’s Division of Elections said Thursday that it’s combing through this initial, mammoth list of names — which were flagged during a computer database search — to make sure its list is as clean and as small as possible. The state is then turning over smaller batches of the more-verified names to local county election supervisors, who are contacting the potential non-citizens to see if they can lawfully vote. By the end of the process, the state could send counties as many as 22,000 names to check, one election source indicated, in a state with more than 12 million total voters. Right now, local supervisors have been sent nearly 2,700 names, about 2,000 of which are in Miami-Dade, Florida’s most-populous and most-immigrant heavy county.

Tennessee: Super Tuesday voting glitch prompts Lincoln Davis lawsuit | The Tennessean

Former U.S. Rep. Lincoln Davis is suing the state, claiming that he and thousands of other Tennesseans were illegally taken off voter rolls in a recent purge of old registrations. Davis filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court Monday that says state election officials broke the law by not requiring more than 70,000 voters to be notified that their registrations had been canceled. Davis decided to sue after he and his wife were turned away at the polls when they attempted to vote in the Fentress County Democratic primary last Tuesday. “We’re seeing what I believe (is) an attack on individuals’ opportunity to be able to vote,” Davis said.

Tennessee: Democratic Party Says Election Commission Should Reveal Names Of Purged Voters | Chattanoogan.com

Announcing its support for the class action lawsuit filed by former congressman Lincoln Davis, naming as defendants Governor Bill Haslam, Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett and Tennessee of Coordinator of Elections Marty Goins, the Hamilton County Democratic Party called on the Hamilton County Election Commission to join the lawsuit, and also to release the names of voters who have been purged from voter rolls since Mr. Goins’ appointment on Feb. 11, 2009. “As of Dec. 1, 2011, approximately 8,000 voters had been purged from the rolls in Hamilton County, just according to the six-month report included in the lawsuit,” said Hamilton County Democratic Party Chairman Paul Smith. “That is far more than would be needed to decide an election. We have the right to know who was purged, why, their party affiliation, their gender and their race. If the election commission is truly fair and unbiased, it will join the lawsuit and release this information to the public.”

Tennessee: Former U.S. Rep. Lincoln Davis says he was denied right to vote | The Tennessean

Former U.S. Rep. Lincoln Davis said he and his wife Lynda were denied the right to vote Tuesday in his Fentress County hometown. “We walked in and they told me I was not a registered voter. I had been taken off the list,” said Davis, who served two terms representing the fourth congressional district of Tennessee, leaving office in 2011. “These are people who I grew up with. I told them I live here. I went to school about 20 yards away.” Davis has been voting in Pall Mall, Tenn., since 1995, he said. He has also voted in city elections, in Pickett County’s Byrdstown, where he served as mayor from 1978-82, for about the last 15 years, he said.

Editorials: The truth about voter suppression – 2012 Elections | Salon.com

The national trauma of the 2000 presidential election and its messy denouement in Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court made, for a brief moment, election reform a cause célèbre. The scrutiny of election administration went far beyond the vote counting and recounting that dominated headlines. The Florida saga cast a harsh light on the whole country’s archaic and fragmented system of election administration, exemplified by a state where hundreds of thousands of citizens were disenfranchised by incompetent and malicious voter purges, Reconstruction-era felon voting bans, improper record-keeping, and deliberate deception and harassment.

The outrage generated by the revelations of 2000 soon spent itself or was channeled into other avenues, producing, as a sort of consolation prize, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, an underambitious and underfunded law mainly aimed at preventing partisan mischief in vote counting. The fundamental problem of accepting 50 different systems for election administration, complicated even more in states like Florida where local election officials control most decisions with minimal federal, state or judicial oversight, was barely touched by HAVA. As Judith Browne-Dianis, of the civil rights group the Advancement Project, told me: “The same cracks in the system have persisted.”

US Virgin Islands: Elections preparing to purge voter rolls | Virgin Islands Daily News

The St. Thomas-St. John District Board of Elections will begin cancelling about 4,700 voter registrations this week. According to law, if a voter misses two consecutive elections, that voter’s registration is cancelled, and he or she must re-register to vote in any future elections.

Following each election, the Elections staff sifts through the voter books and pulls out the registrations to be cancelled. Notices are sent out urging those voters to apply for reinstatement if they do not want to be pulled from the voter rolls.