06/11/12
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) said he will sue the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to move forward with his controversial attempt to purge the voter-rolls in his state of ineligible voters.
“I have a job to do to defend the right of legitimate voters,” Scott told Fox News on Monday. “We’ve been asking for the Department of Homeland Security’s database, SAVE, for months, and they haven’t given it to us. So this afternoon, we will be filing a lawsuit, the secretary of State of Florida, against the Department of Homeland Security to give us that database. We want to have fair, honest elections in our state and we have been put in a position that we have to sue the federal government to get this information.”
Last week, the Department of Justice demanded Florida stop the voter-roll purge, saying it violated the federal Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act, and was reliant on faulty Department of Motor Vehicle records to determine who is eligible to vote.
Republicans argue that state voter registration rolls are filled with noncitizens and others that are ineligible to vote. Democrats argue that the GOP is trying to strip voting rights from groups that tend to vote Democratic, and that there are only a handful of cases of voter fraud of the kind the GOP seeks to root out.
[ed. Like dead people? If the Dems removed all of those you'd probably be left with 10 people voting for these bunch of clowns, nationwide...]
Any Florida resident that is eligible to vote that is purged from the voter rolls would have to verify their citizenship in order to be allowed to vote.
Scott is a Tea Party favorite who came into office in the 2010 wave election, but has seen his favorability rating plummet into the low 30s since taking office. The lawsuit could spark another heated election-year clash in a battleground state, similar to the Democratic attempt to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) after he stripped public workers of their collective bargaining rights.
