Rick Scott is making it harder to vote. Flickr/Donkey HoteyScore one for Gov. Rick Scott, who is moving ahead with plans to ferret out “noncitizens” on Florida’s voter rolls. The tea party stalwart won a yearlong battle with the Obama administration last weekend when the Department of Homeland Security agreed to let the state check its voter registrations against a federal database of resident aliens in the United States. Along with ongoing efforts to crack down on voters without IDs and keep convicts away from the polls, it’s a thinly disguised voter suppression tactic that could tip the electoral scales in the crucial battleground state. (Read more…) Scott’s communications director, Brian Burgess, bragged on Saturday that “all of Florida wins!” because of this development.
It’s not clear just how helpful the DHS database—known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE—will be to Florida Republicans. SAVE does not contain a comprehensive list of the estimated 11.5 million people who are in the United States without authorization; rather, it tracks resident aliens who have visas to stay in the US. Here’s how Scott’s plan is supposed to work: Florida will provide a number for each person it suspects of not being a US citizen, and then the feds will check that against SAVE to confirm whether the person is in the US illegally. And then the state will check its voter lists to see if that person is registered to vote.
[VIA MoJo Blogs and Articles | Mother Jones]
