Not So Slick, Rick: Department of Justice suing Florida over voter purge

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Finally. On the same day Rick Scott announced that Florida will be suing the Dept. of Homeland Security to access a database believed to hold information about the citizenship status of Florida voters, the Department of Justice announced that they will be suing the state over violating the National Voter Registration Act and the Voting Rights Act:

In a five-page letter, however, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said Florida is not complying with federal laws aimed at “ensuring that state efforts to find and purge ineligible persons from voter registration lists do not endanger the ability of eligible U.S. citizens to register to vote and maintain their voter registration status.”

“The federal statutes that the department has called to Florida’s attention here are longstanding requirements of which the state is certainly aware,” Perez wrote in the letter addressed to Detzner. “Because the state has indicated its unwillingness to comply with these requirements, I have authorized the initiation of an enforcement action against Florida in federal court.”

You can read the entire letter here. As you may know, this action by the DOJ is the result of an aggressive attempt made by the Republican governor to disenfranchise as many voters as possible before the presidential election — conveniently targeting Latinos and Democrats. And as it’s come to light that a huge percentage of the folks he’s already targeted as ineligible actually are citizens, Ricky’s newest tactic targeting the administration comes a wee too late. I mean, who knew that almost blindly identifying thousands of Florida residents as “non-citizens” would be, like, breaking the rules?

We’ll keep you posted as the story develops.

 Via.

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