Florida ‘purge’ update: 96 illegal voters found, and counting

Florida ‘purge’ update: 96 illegal voters found, and counting
By:John Hayward
6/14/2012 11:56 AM

While partisan Democrats and vote-fraud enthusiasts bleat about the supposed unfairness of validating voter registration, the state of Florida quietly continues discovering illegal voters. Responses to the certified letters sent to 2,600 questionable registered voters continue to trickle in. Many of those challenged by the Florida Department of State have been able to produce documentation showing they are, in fact, legal voters.

And many have not.

The one thing you almost never hear in media reports about this supposedly “controversial” procedure, which the Justice Department just filed suit to halt, is how many illegal voters it has discovered. According to a report in the Naples Daily News on Wednesday, that tally now stands at 96.

That’s ninety-six people who would have been “disenfranchised” if Florida had not detected the ineligible voters. The number of legitimate voters accidentally and unfairly disenfranchised by Florida’s procedure, meanwhile, is zero.

Curiously, half of the non-citizens illegally registered to vote in Florida come from a single county, and it’s not the one containing Miami. It’s Lee County, which is on the opposite coast. This isn’t necessarily because a disproportionately large population of illegal voters lives in the county; it’s because Lee County has been particularly diligent at rooting them out. The task of cleaning up voter registrations was farmed out to each individual Florida county, which proceeds as it sees fit.

Lee County Supervisor of Elections Sharon Harrington has been particularly effective at spotting illegal voters, and it seems she did not entirely rely upon the state’s list of questionable names – prepared without access to the most up-to-date data from the Department of Homeland Security, which withheld its database from Florida, in violation of clear federal law.

According to the Naples Daily News, Harrington took the initiative and compared a list of the people who asked to be excused from jury duty, because they were not U.S. citizens, with the county voter rolls. She found that “nearly half of those potential jurors who said they weren’t citizens were listed in her files as being eligible to vote.” She has actually discovered some ineligible voters beyond the list of 2600 names prepared by the Florida Department of State.

Let me restate that, for the benefit of the anti-patriotic charlatans and political hacks who keep trying to protect the voter fraud racket in America, or lie through their teeth by portraying it as some kind of racist assault on minority voters. This county supervisor merely took a list of dismissed jurors, who openly stated they were not citizens, in writing, under oath, and discovered half of them were also illegally registered to vote.

I would imagine most, if not all, counties in the United States could do the same thing, any time they wished. But they don’t. And if they do, Attorney General Eric Holder will probably march past the piles of subpoenaed Fast and Furious documents he refuses to provide congressional investigators, and sue them.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has weighed in on the Florida voter registration issue. “I wouldn’t characterize it as an effort to purge Latinos from the voting rolls,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “I would characterize it as twofold. Number One is, I think there's the goal of ensuring that everyone who votes in Florida is qualified to vote. If you're not a citizen of the United States, you shouldn't be voting. That's the law. And, I mean, what's the counter to that, that we're willing to tolerate 100 illegal voters on our rolls? How could anyone argue against a state identifying people who are not rightfully on the voter rolls and removing them from the voter rolls? They shouldn't be voting.”

Rubio allowed that criticism of specific procedures employed in the quest to validate voter registration was fair enough, but added, “I don’t think, in order not to kick off a single legal voter, we have to somehow tolerate the existence of one hundred, two hundred, or even five illegal voters. I just don’t think that’s a valid choice.”

Senator Rubio is of Cuban lineage. For the black Florida conservative perspective on the state’s efforts to clean up voter registration, let us turn to Rep. Allen West, who takes a dim view of efforts to stuff ballot boxes, or work up outrage among minority voters with phony allegations of racism. West was even more blunt about the prospect of the Justice Department suing Florida, calling Attorney General Holder a “national embarrassment”:

Click here to watch video.

At the very least, shouldn’t every county in America be checking to see if people who swear, under oath, that they aren’t American citizens are not listed as registered voters? Shouldn’t some computer system be doing that automatically?
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To read another article about cleaning up Democrat's voter fraud, click here.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.