Florida Gov. Rick Scott begins voter disenfranchisement tactics, targeting Latinos

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Many of us know what an exceptionally heinous human being Florida Governor Rick Scott is, and he’s won that title pretty easily over the past few years: vetoing funds for rape centers during Sexual Assault Awareness month, cutting funding to programs for people with disabilities (while conjunctively calling for billions in corporate and property tax cuts), supporting immigration legislation that would exempt white people – these are just a few of the gems he’s brought to the state of Florida.

So what is his new pet project? To disenfranchise potentially thousands of voters in efforts to win Mitt Romney the presidency. Think Progress reports: 

Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) has ordered the state to purge all “non-citizens” from the voting rolls prior to November’s election. But that list compiled by the Scott administration is so riddled with errors that, in Miami-Dade County alone, hundreds of U.S. citizens are being told they are ineligible to vote, ThinkProgress has learned exlusively.

According to data from the Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections obtained by ThinkProgress:

- 1638 people in Miami-Dade County were flagged by the state as “non-citizens” and sent letters informing them that they were ineligible to vote.

- Of that group, 359 people have subsquently provided the county with proof of citizenship.

- Another 26 people were identified as U.S. citizens directly by the county.

- The bulk of the remaining 1200 people have simply not responded yet to a letter sent to them by the Supervisor of Elections.

So at least 20 percent (and very likely more) of government-identified “non-citizens” in Miami-Dade county are actually citizens.  And shockingly, the majority of them are Hispanic, Democrats and independent-minded.

The scary thing is that this could potentially be déjà vu for this year’s presidential election — in 2000, the disputed margin was 537 votes, with one estimate saying that 7,000 eligible voters were unjustly removed from the polls.

A number of organizations and legal entities have submitted a letter to the Secretary of State about the legality of Scott’s actions; help them out and call Ken Detzner at 850.245.6500 to let him know that this blatant purging of eligible Florida voters must be investigated, or stopped altogether.

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