On Monday, Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) defended his administration’s highly controversial decision to purge suspected non-citizens from voting rolls.”We need to have fair elections,” he told the Miami Herald. “When you vote, you want to make sure that the other individuals that are voting have a right to vote…If you’re a candidate, you want to make sure that the people that vote in your election are people who have a right to vote,” said the Republican politician.
Scott also took a couple subliminal shots at the Obama administration, blaming the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for taking too long to provide Florida with access to an immigration database. According to the Huffington Post, without that information, state officials carried out their search using dated Department of Motor Vehicle citizenship records, eventually cutting down an initial list of around 180,000 potential non-citizen voters to 2,700.
If this seems like a flagrant violation of National Voting Right Act laws, that’s because it is. “Our records do not reflect that these changes affecting voting have been submitted to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for judicial review or to the Attorney General for administrative review as required by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,” said T. Christian Herren, head of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division.
