“Violating Basic Civil Rights”: Gov Rick Scott’s Florida Voter Purge Gets Pushback From Elections Supervisors And U.S. Justice Dept
Florida elections supervisors said Friday they will discontinue a state-directed effort to remove names from county voter rolls because they believe the state data is flawed and because the U.S. Department of Justice has said the process violates federal voting laws.
Late Thursday, the Department of Justice sent Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner a letter telling him that an effort launched by Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s administration last year to remove the names of people believed to be non-citizens from voter rolls appears to violate at least two federal voting laws. The federal agency gave Detzner until Wednesday to respond.
The Justice Department letter and mistakes that the 67 county elections supervisors have found in the state list make the scrub undoable, said Martin County Elections Supervisor Vicki Davis, president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections.
“There are just too many variables with this entire process at this time for supervisors to continue,” Davis said.
Ron Labasky, the association’s general counsel, sent a memo to the 67 supervisors Friday telling them to stop processing the list.
“I recommend that Supervisors of Elections cease any further action until the issues raised by the Department of Justice are resolved between the parties or by a Court,” Labasky wrote.
Davis said the effect on supervisors will be “if they’ve started the process and they do find out that someone is ineligible to vote and they have credible and reliable information to back it up, then they will remove that person from the database. But if they have not had contact with someone on the list, they’re stopping at that point.”
Detzner in April sent supervisors a list of more than 2,600 voters his Division of Elections had identified as potential non-citizens by matching the state’s voter registration database with driver license records. Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher received 115 such names.
Supervisors were supposed to send letters to those on the list notifying them to provide proof of citizenship within 30 days or be removed from the voter rolls. But supervisors say they have found errors, including some on the list who have died, many who have become naturalized citizens since they first got their driver licenses, and others who are U.S.-born citizens — including a 91-year-old, Brooklyn-born World War II hero who now lives in Broward County.
Detzner’s spokesman, Chris Cate, said of the supervisors’ plan, “The supervisors have the ultimate duty of making the determination of eligibility. We respect the process and we have confidence in their capability to determine if someone is an ineligible voter or not.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department said the scrub appears to violate at least two federal National Voting Rights Act laws.
Five counties in Florida require federal approval before any voting or election changes are made for those counties, but Detzner did not seek approval from the Justice Department or a federal court, according to the letter written by T. Christian Herren, chief of the Justice Department’s voting section.
Florida’s current effort also appears to violate the National Voting Right Act’s prohibition on any major voter scrub 90 days before an election, Herron wrote. With an Aug. 14 primary scheduled in Florida, that would prohibit scrubs after May 16.
Herren gave Detzner until Wednesday to respond “so that the Department can determine what further action, if any, is necessary.”
Detzner issued a press release Friday indicating he will respond on time but will not back down from the state’s effort.
“As Florida’s Chief Election Officer, I am committed to ensuring the accuracy of Florida’s voter rolls and the integrity of our elections. . . . The Department will continue to act in a responsible and cautious manner when presented with credible information about potentially ineligible voters. No one that has the right to vote has been denied the opportunity to cast a vote, and as the Secretary, it is my duty to ensure that remains the case,” Detzner said.
Cate said the agency disagrees with the federal department’s interpretation of the 90-day restriction on voter list maintenance.
“We’ll address that specifically in our response to DOJ,” he said. “We have a year-round responsibility to make sure ineligible voters cannot cast a ballot.”
Detzner also has blamed federal officials for the faulty data. On Thursday, he sent a request to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for access to its Systematic Alien Verification of Eligibility database so that his department could use it to identify potentially ineligible voters.
Last month the state’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles volunteered to help state elections officials by using its access to the federal database to check Florida’s list of suspected non-citizens. But this week the highway department determined it is only allowed to use the list to check the names of people who are applying for driver licenses or state identification cards, DHSMV spokeswoman Courtney Heidelberg said.
The effort to remove names of immigrants from voter rolls has sparked accusations from civil-rights and liberal groups that Scott’s Republican administration is trying to suppress voter turnout in November in the crucial swing state of Florida.
“The question no one is asking is why are they doing this,” said Progress Florida Political Director Damien Filer. “The fact is Rick Scott is carrying on a disgraceful GOP legacy of disenfranchising voters in Florida. And he’s doing it on purpose. Sadly, Florida is once again a late-show punch line. Jon Stewart and Jay Leno are no doubt thrilled. Florida voters, not so much.”
In 2000, thousands of eligible voters were not allowed to vote because of an error-riddled felon voter list created under Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration. State officials abandoned another problematic felon voter list four years later.
Liberal activists started an online petition at credoaction.com asking the Justice Department to intervene, and Democrats, including Boca Raton U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, have asked Scott’s administration to abandon the effort.
GOP leaders also intensified the rhetoric this week.
Republican Party of Florida Chairman Lenny Curry urged supporters to call or e–mail the White House to demand that the Homeland Security department give Detzner access to its database.
“While Democrats and their liberal special interests demagogue the important issue of securing our elections, they seem happy to accept that illegal voters may be in our system,” Curry said on the party’s website, rpof.org. “Florida’s Republicans believe the vote is the foundation of our democracy, and it is too important to allow even one illegal vote to be cast.”
Florida Democratic Party Executive Director Scott Arceneaux responded, “Pointing the finger at SAVE or other databases is a smokescreen and it’s a red herring for a system that’s clearly rife with error.”
By: Dara Kam, Staff Writer, The Palm Beach Post, June 2, 2012
“An Inconvenient Storyline”: A Second Romney-Backed Solar Company Files For Bankruptcy
On Thursday, Mitt Romney campaigned at the headquarters of Solyndra — the first renewable energy company to receive a federal loan under the stimulus — and reiterated his debunked claims that its bankruptcy symbolized the corruption and cronyism of the Obama administration. But just one day later, a solar panel developer “that landed a state loan from Mitt Romney when he was Massachusetts governor” went belly up, the Boston Herald reports, creating an inconvenient storyline for the GOP presidential nominee.
The company, Konarka Technologies, “filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection and will cease operations, lay off its 85 workers and liquidate”:
“Konarka has been unable to obtain additional financing, and given its current financial condition, it is unable to continue operations,” CEO Howard Berke said in a statement. “This is a tragedy for Konarka’s shareholders and employees and for the development of alternative energy in the United States.”
The demise of Konarka could become a hot topic on the campaign trail because Romney personally doled out a $1.5 million renewable energy subsidy to the Lowell startup in 2003, shortly after taking office on Beacon Hill.
Konarka is the second Massachusetts solar company, along with Evergreen Solar and Beacon Power, to receive taxpayer dollars under Romney’s tenure and subsequently declare bankruptcy.
Romney, meanwhile, routinely dismisses the nation’s 3.1 million clean energy jobs, even as clean energy is booming in Massachusetts. The industry has created 64,000 jobs across the energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, June 2, 2012
“The Panicky Man”: Mitt Romney’s Ridiculous Unemployment Reaction
Unemployment, which is high but generally dropping, ticked up a tenth of a percent in May to 8.2 percent. This is not good news. There were 69,000 jobs created—a big improvement over the months when the country was hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs—but still not what economists had hoped for or expected.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney, the soon-to-be GOP presidential nominee, called it “devastating news.”
Devastating? Seriously? It’s a disappointment, to be sure. But “devastating” is a word used to describe rubble-making crises, things like Hurricane Katrina or the 9/11 attacks. It sounds over-the-top from anyone, but in Romney’s case, the hyperbole is worse, since it just ends up underscoring Romney’s fatal flaw.
Romney’s not a passionate guy. He has a very calculating manner about him—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since it means he’s capable of making tough decisions without being overly influenced by emotion. This is a man who withdrew from the 2008 Republican presidential candidate race in February of that year, and endorsed Sen. John McCain soon afterward. This is not the behavior of a man given to delusion or hysteria. This was the behavior of a man who took an objective look at his own situation and concluded he could not win the nomination. So he wasn’t going to continue on a quixotic and ultimately losing quest.
It’s that sort of businesslike calm—or coldness, if you will—that is both Romney’s greatest asset and liability. He fails to connect with voters in large part because he appears to be driven by cold statistics instead of compassion, or indeed any emotion. But he also can use that to his advantage, casting himself as the person able to make hard decisions during tough times.
Calling a one tenth of 1 percent uptick in the unemployment rate “devastating” makes Romney look ridiculous. It makes one wonder how he’d react in a far worse crisis. But mostly, it appears phony. Romney already has trouble convincing people he has a solid core of principles, since he has changed his position on gay rights and abortion. Pretending to be Panicky Man doesn’t help.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, June 1, 2012
“Post Office Box 72465”: A Pervasive Mess With An End Run Around Campaign Finance Laws
To grasp the clear and present danger that the current flood of campaign cash poses to American democracy, consider the curious case of Post Office Box 72465. It demonstrates that the explosion of super PAC spending is only the second-most troubling development of recent campaign cycles.
Box 72465, on a desert road near Phoenix, belongs to a little-known group called the Center to Protect Patient Rights. According to reports by the Center for Responsive Politics and the Los Angeles Times, the center funneled more than $55 million to 26 Republican-leaning groups during the 2010 midterm election.
Where is the money from? The Times found links to the conservative Koch brothers, yet because the center is a nonprofit corporation, it is impossible to know. Such groups must disclose how they distribute their money, not who donates to them.
This privacy makes sense in the context of ordinary nonprofits. But in the push-the-envelope world of modern campaigns, in which such groups spend millions of dollars on thinly disguised campaign ads, the result is an end run around the fundamental principle of campaign finance law: that voters are entitled to know who is trying to influence elections.
Even the Supreme Court understands this: Disclosure, it wrote in its otherwise appalling 2010 Citizens United ruling, “permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way. This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”
Except when, as in the case of the Center to Protect Patient Rights, the identities — and motives — of those giving are hidden from public view. The center sent almost $13 million to the American Future Fund, a Des Moines-based group that ran campaigns against two dozen Democrats in 2010. Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) was targeted with what the Times described as “a $2-million fusillade” of radio ads, robo-calls and mailers.
“It was almost a feeling of helplessness because there was no way to identify who the source of the funds was,” Braley said. He won by two percentage points, after a 29-point margin two years earlier.
The gusher of secret money that nearly toppled Braley promises to be even more abundant this year — and the groups behind the undisclosed cash remain determined to do whatever it takes to keep the sources hidden.
In March, ruling in a lawsuit brought by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a federal judge found that the Federal Election Commission was wrong to exempt nonprofits and other groups that run “electioneering communications” — advertising that names specific candidates within a short time before the election — from having to reveal their donors.
It says something about the FEC that the agency charged with overseeing campaign reporting would come out against disclosure.
Luckily, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson disagreed. “Congress intended to shine light on whoever was behind the communications bombarding voters immediately prior to elections,” she wrote. The federal appeals court in Washington refused to stay the ruling while an appeal was underway.
The response from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was telling: It would switch its way of influencing elections rather than reveal its donors. The chamber, which has made itself a major political player, plans to spend more than $50 million during the 2012 campaign.
At a breakfast with reporters this week, chamber officials said that, in reaction to the ruling, the organization would conduct its political spending through independent expenditures that explicitly support or oppose particular candidates.
Such is the perverse mess that is the current campaign finance law. Under the Citizens United ruling, corporations, such as the chamber, can make unlimited independent expenditures. The upshot is that advertising like the chamber’s can be even more brutal — because it won’t have to pretend to be merely “educating” voters — and just as opaque.
Meanwhile, the American Future Fund, the organization that ran ads against Braley, has brazenly asked the FEC to approve a different end run. The group contends that if its ads merely mention “the administration” or “the White House,” they would not be attacking a “clearly identified candidate” and therefore not subject to disclosure requirements.
This would be laughable — if it were not such a scary illustration of the lengths to which these groups will go to avoid letting voters know who is trying to buy their elections, and the unfortunate likelihood that they will succeed.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 31, 2012
“On WalMart Pond”: Markets, Morals And The Glorification Of Wealth
Does it bother you that an online casino paid a Utah woman, Kari Smith, who needed money for her son’s education, $10,000 to tattoo its Web site on her forehead?
Or that Project Prevention, a charity, pays women with drug or alcohol addictions $300 cash to get sterilized or undertake long-term contraception? Some 4,100 women have accepted this offer.
Michael Sandel, the Harvard political theorist, cites those examples in “What Money Can’t Buy,” his important and thoughtful new book. He argues that in recent years we have been slipping without much reflection into relying upon markets in ways that undermine the fairness of our society.
That’s one of the underlying battles this campaign year. Many Republicans, Mitt Romney included, have a deep faith in the ability of laissez-faire markets to create optimal solutions.
There’s something to that faith because markets, indeed, tend to be efficient. Pollution taxes are widely accepted as often preferable than rigid regulations on pollutants. It may also make sense to sell advertising on the sides of public buses, perhaps even to sell naming rights to subway stations.
Still, how far do we want to go down this path?
• Is it right that prisoners in Santa Ana, Calif., can pay $90 per night for an upgrade to a cleaner, nicer jail cell?
• Should the United States really sell immigration visas? A $500,000 investment will buy foreigners the right to immigrate.
• Should Massachusetts have gone ahead with a proposal to sell naming rights to its state parks? The Boston Globe wondered in 2003 whether Walden Pond might become Wal-Mart Pond.
• Should strapped towns accept virtually free police cars that come laden with advertising on the sides? Such a deal was negotiated and then ultimately collapsed, but at least one town does sell advertising on its police cars.
“The marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives,” Sandel writes. “We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools. You might call it the skyboxification of American life. It’s not good for democracy, nor is it a satisfying way to live.”
“Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?”
This issue goes to the heart of fairness in our country. There has been much discussion recently about economic inequality, but almost no conversation about the way the spread of markets nurtures a broader, systemic inequality.
We do, of course, place some boundaries on markets. I can’t buy the right to cut off your leg for my amusement. Americans can sell blood, but (perhaps mistakenly) we don’t allow markets for kidneys and other organs, even though that would probably save lives.
Wealthy people can, in effect, buy access to the president at a $40,000-a-plate dinner, but they can’t purchase a Medal of Freedom. A major political donor can sometimes buy an ambassadorship, but not to an important country.
Where to draw the lines limiting the role of markets isn’t clear to me, but I’m pretty sure that we’ve already gone too far. I’m offended when governments auction naming rights to public property or sell special access, even if only to fast lanes on a highway or better cells in a jail. It is one thing for Delta Air Lines to have first class and coach. It is quite another for government to offer first class and coach in the essential services that government provides.
Where would this stop? Do we let people pay to get premium police and fire protection? Do we pursue an idea raised by Judge Richard Posner to auction off the right to adopt children?
We already have tremendous inequality in our country: The richest 1 percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. But we do still have a measure of equality before the law — equality in our basic dignity — and that should be priceless.
“Market fundamentalism,” to use the term popularized by George Soros, is gaining ground. It’s related to the glorification of wealth over the last couple of decades, to the celebration of opulence, and to the emergence of a new aristocracy. Market fundamentalists assume a measure of social Darwinism and accept that laissez-faire is always optimal.
That’s the dogma that helped lead to bank deregulation and the current economic mess. And anyone who honestly believes that low taxes and unfettered free markets are always best should consider moving to Pakistan’s tribal areas. They are a triumph of limited government, negligible taxes, no “burdensome regulation” and free markets for everything from drugs to AK-47s.
If you’re infatuated with unfettered free markets, just visit Waziristan.
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 30. 2012
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