Lyons: Previous voter purge efforts don't inspire confidence

Published: Wednesday, October 9, 2013 at 11:06 p.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, October 9, 2013 at 11:06 p.m.

Some people not legally eligible to vote do so anyway.

So just how big a problem is that in Florida?

Not big at all, except in the rhetoric of those trying to justify extreme means to purge them from voter rolls.

Fact is, so few ineligible voters ever actually vote that their number is overwhelmed by the number of legal voters the purge attempts have prevented from voting, or tried to. And yet some Florida governors have kept on trying to purge away, no matter how many times the faulty methods are now declared illegal or otherwise blow up in their faces.

Like Wile E. Coyote's schemes to get the Road Runner, each effort has its own absurdities.

Rick Scott, our current governor, has been as open as any other past state executive about his desire to dump illegal voters, and has promised it would be done right this time, without the usual gross flaws.

His administration first used a driver's license database to identify 180,000 voters somehow suspected of being illegally registered to vote, so that local election supervisors could start dumping them.

Many of them balked, and oh so rightly. They knew better, thanks to past experiences and because it was obvious that the huge majority of those named would turn out to be lawful voters guilty of nothing but being wrongly put on the list.

The supervisors had learned from the infamous 2000 election, just for starters.

Remember that one? The brother of Florida's governor won the U.S. presidency that year because he carried Florida by, according to controversial tallies, less than 600 votes. But more than enough lawful Florida voters were purged and turned away from the polls — and overwhelmingly they were Democrats — to have very potentially changed the outcome.

So in 2004, when Gov. Jeb Bush announced that another purge list would be made, he adamantly promised that, that time, the list would be fair and square and carefully checked.

Despite this promise, his administration fought to keep Herald-Tribune reporters from having access to the new list to check it in advance. But the Herald-Tribune won a legal fight, and got the list.

By then the reporters had just a short time to check the list before it became too late to matter. Even so, they quickly found a huge and grossly unfair flaw, one the Division of Elections could not possibly have missed. So huge, that after the Herald-Tribune story ran and the news went national, Gov. Jeb Bush — at the last minute, on a weekend — called a meeting of election officials and killed the purge.

The absurd “mistake”: The list would have purged only illegally registered voters who did not have Hispanic last names. While black voters were again heavily represented, virtually all Hispanics got a pass. And in Florida, Hispanics were believed more likely to vote Republican, by the way.

I wrote a column then that mentioned how odd it was that Jeb Bush never thanked this newspaper for heading off a another election scandal.

I'm still puzzled about that.

Given the history, you can see why our current governor's effort is not always presumed to be fair and competent or based on pure-hearted desire to bar the rare illegal voter and thereby preserve our democracy.

After news that Scott's first purge list named a whopping 180,000 people who allegedly seemed to be illegally registered, various election supervisors foresaw an enormous number of wild goose chases and sounded the alarm. Afterward, Scott's original list was culled down to an apparently reasonable 2,600 names that actually were sent to county election officials.

But the level of absurdity on this bogusly hyped quest is such that even then, the overwhelming majority of those 2,600 names was still wrong. And so, it still caused hassles for election officials and some lawful voters.

Sarasota's Supervisor of Elections, Kathy Dent, had a typical experience with the 14 names sent to her. After taking time to check records and contact the people, it eventually turned out that only one voter was improperly registered.

Yes, one. And who knows if that person would even have voted?

Good thing most elections supervisors, no matter their party, are on to this and no longer play along with the inflated purge-list game.


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