Andrew Skerritt: Will halting the voter purge help Scott with Hispanic voters?

 The farce is over — thankfully. Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner called a halt to his voter purge — a hunt for ghost non-citizens who apparently have been standing in line to cast ballots and elect Democrats. 

 “From the beginning, I have said that the law requires state officials to ensure that the voter rolls are accurate and only contain eligible voters,” Detzner wrote to county election supervisors last week. “An ineligible vote nullifies an eligible vote. I don’t think that’s fair to Floridians.”

Detzner’s memo is both self-congratulatory and Orwellian. He claimed he fought for access to the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program to get more reliable information so he could protect us humble voters. He stopped the planned purge because the DHS had not completed an upgrade to its system. He’s acting in our best interest.

“As Secretary of State, it is my duty to defend the right to vote in Florida,” Detzner said in the memo. Based on everything we know, Detzner and the Rick Scott administration have always tried to do the opposite. Prior to the 2012 election, more than 182,000 registered voters were wrongly purged from the rolls.

What Detzner and Republicans were labeling a sanitation of voter rolls, others saw as voter intimidation and voter suppression, just another tool in the bag of voter suppression tricks. In 2012, Scott’s administration shortened early voting, denied felons their civil rights and made it difficult for third party folks to collect signatures.

Not surprisingly, few people were impressed. “Previous purges initiated by the Department of State have resulted in embarrassment for the state of Florida and have done nothing to make our elections process more secure,” said a Florida League of Women Voters statement in response to Detzner’s memo.

I believe in the sanctity of the right to vote. Non-citizens shouldn’t vote and neither should dead citizens. But I agree with the Florida ACLU’s Howard Simon when he charged that the purge was a cynical attempt to undermine the electoral process. If people think the system is corrupt, they’ll stay home. Guess who wins?

But this was never really about preventing ineligible voters from casting ballots.

“The number of ineligible individuals on Florida databases is statistically insignificant,” said veteran Leon County Supervisor of Election Ion Sancho. Conveniently, Detzner’s  memo chose to omit the number of ineligible voters found so far.

None of this has anything to do with the respect for democracy. It’s about partisan politics, winning elections. There is no way Detzner makes this move without consulting his boss, Scott. There is no way Detzner halts the purge if he didn’t believe it would help the governor’s re-election by shoring up his faltering support among Latino voters.

And voters can thank him and Scott the only way they know how – by voting in November.

Andrew J. Skerritt is author of Ashamed to Die: Silence, Denial and the AIDS Epidemic in the South. He lives in Tallahassee. Follow him on Twitter @andrewjskerritt. Column courtesy of Context Florida.