Opinion
Cautious winner
TBO.com
Published: June 30, 2012
On the following page, Andrew J. Skerritt, a journalism professor at Florida A&M University, criticizes the effort by Florida officials to purge the state's voter rolls of people who aren't U.S. citizens. According to Skerritt, it is "obvious that Gov. Rick Scott is bent on discouraging minority voters from heading to the polls" because many whose eligibility is being reviewed are black or Latino. Scott and other people urging that noncitizens be removed from the rolls say they are merely trying to prevent voter fraud.Published: June 30, 2012
On Wednesday, a U.S. District Court judge rejected a U.S. Department of Justice suit seeking an end to the attempted purging of noncitizen voters. The Justice Department maintained that the list of suspected noncitizen voters the state has been using contained "critical imperfections," and that the purge was illegal under federal law because it was taking place too close to the 2012 election season.
In rejecting the Justice Department's case, District Judge Robert Hinkle, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton, held, in effect, that nothing in federal law could be construed as allowing people who aren't citizens to vote.
After Hinkle's ruling, a Scott spokesman said the state won't send county election supervisors a longer list of voters with questioned citizenship for review until the U.S. Department of Homeland Security gives Florida officials access to a federal immigration database. Because of the suspicions surrounding the purge process, this was a prudent move.