Northwest Indiana Discussion

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) said he will sue the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to move forward with his controversial attempt to purge the voter-rolls in his state of ineligible voters.

“I have a job to do to defend the right of legitimate voters,” Scott told Fox News on Monday. “We’ve been asking for the Department of Homeland Security’s database, SAVE, for months, and they haven’t given it to us. So this afternoon, we will be filing a lawsuit, the secretary of State of Florida, against the Department of Homeland Security to give us that database. We want to have fair, honest elections in our state and we have been put in a position that we have to sue the federal government to get this information.”

Last week, the Department of Justice demanded Florida stop the voter-roll purge, saying it violated the federal Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act, and was reliant on faulty Department of Motor Vehicle records to determine who is eligible to vote.

The Scott administration responded with a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder saying it would continue the voter-roll purge, and is now seeking the DHS federal database as a part of that push.

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice is suing the state of Florida to halt its efforts to purge voter rolls of noncitizens who are illegally registered to vote.

The complaint alleges that the state has violated Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by relying on inaccurate and unreliable voter verification procedures and by conducting the purge within 90 days of a federal election. Florida has a primary scheduled for Aug. 14.

Assistant Atty. Gen. Thomas E. Perez said in a statement that the state appears to have “undertaken a new program for voter removal within this 90-day period that has critical imperfections, which lead to errors that harm and confuse eligible voters.”

The suit comes just a day after Florida sued the Department of Homeland Security for failing to allow it to check voter names against a database that contains citizenship information.

Perez sent the state a letter on Monday that warned that a lawsuit was imminent.

The purge began last year when Republican Gov. Rick Scott asked the state to identify noncitizens who are illegally registered to vote.

Officials checked the voter rolls against the state’s driver’s license database and have petitioned Homeland Security for access to its citizenship database, but the department says the database is not designed to be compared against voter registration rolls.

Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner defended the purge in a letter to the Justice Department this month. He said the purge is intended to “identify and remove noncitizens from [Florida’s] voter rolls [to] ensure that the right to vote of citizens is protected and is not diluted by the votes of ineligible persons.”

A local election official in Pennsylvania announced plans Thursday to defy the state and resist enforcing its newly enacted voter ID law, signed by Gov. Tom Corbett (R) earlier this year.

Christopher Broach, a Democrat who oversees elections in Delaware County, a Keystone State suburb, told thePhiladelphia Inquirer he won’t ask voters to present ID because it’s a violation of their civil rights, implemented “for the sake of getting Mitt Romney elected.”

“To ask me to enforce something that violates civil rights is ludicrous and absolutely something I am not willing to do,” Broach told the outlet in an interview.

Broach is the first election official to publicly declare his intention to ignore the new photo ID measure, but he’s not the only official with concerns. Jane Golas, a Republican inspector of elections for Radnor Township said she believes the law is politically motivated.

“This is a move by people to suppress the vote in the city of Philadelphia,” she told theInquirer. “We never had an issue with people coming in to fraudulently vote.”

While NAACP President Benjamin Jealous lashed out at new state laws requiring photo ID for voting, an NAACP executive sits in prison, sentenced for carrying out a massive voter fraud scheme.

In a story ignored by the national media, in April a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots. Sowers is identified on an NAACP website as a member of the Tunica County NAACP Executive Committee.

Sowers received a five-year prison term for each of the 10 counts, but Circuit Court Judge Charles Webster permitted Sowers to serve those terms concurrently, according to the Tunica Times, the only media outlet to cover the sentencing.

“This crime cuts against the fabric of our free society,” Judge Webster said.

Sowers was found guilty of voting in the names of Carrie Collins, Walter Howard, Sheena Shelton, Alberta Pickett, Draper Cotton and Eddie Davis. She was also convicted of voting in the names of four dead persons: James L. Young, Dora Price, Dorothy Harris, and David Ross.

In the trial, forensic scientist Bo Scales testified that Sowers’s DNA was found on the inner seals of five envelopes containing absentee ballots.

And the fact is:
there is STILL no evidence of voter fraud.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9682&p=145536&hilit=fraud#p145536

Pennsylvania Democrat Says He Will Refuse To Enforce New Voter ID Law
“We never had an issue with people coming in to fraudulently vote.”

Pennsylvania admits it: no voter fraud problem
By Jamelle Bouie
A court filing by the state of Pennsylvania, ahead of a trial starting later this week on a lawsuit filed by civil rights groups against the state’s new voter fraud law, contains an astounding admission:

The state signed a stipulation agreement with lawyers for the plaintiffs which acknowledges there “have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states.”
In other words, the state knows that voter fraud is a nonexistent problem, but will nonetheless defend a law that could potentially disenfranchise a huge number of the state’s voters. Of course, it’s not hard to see why the state — and particularly its Republican governor — would continue to support the measure.

The Pennsylvania voter identification law — passed several months ago by state Republicans — is one of the strictest in the country. Under the law, voters are required to show an unexpired government-issued ID. If an ID is not issued by either the state of Pennsylvania or the federal government, then it will not be accepted (for instance, student IDs from schools outside of the state). If you do not have an ID, you can receive a free one as long as you have a Social Security card, official birth certificate, and two proofs of residency.

It’s hard to overstate the problems with this requirement. A report released by the Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this month, which compared voter registration rolls with transportation department ID databases, found that more than 758,000 Pennsylvanians lack a driver’s license. According to the report, that amounts to 9.2 percent of the state’s 8.2 million voters. This disproportionately includes students, minorities and the elderly, who tend to lack government-issued ID. According to the report, more than 21 percent of nonwhites in the state lack ID. In cities with heavy minority populations, like Philadelphia, 18 percent of the voting population lacks official identification. The ID itself is free, but when you consider the time and money involved in assembling the documents necessary to get one, this gap is likely to remain.

Given the complete absence of voter fraud, the law’s rapid implementation, and the strong support from Republican lawmakers, it’s more than clear that this is a crude attempt to suppress Democratic turnout in the election. Pennsylvania Republicans aren’t shy about this fact. State GOP House Leader Mike Turzai recently admitted the extent to which this law serves no purpose other than to elect Republicans:
“We are focused on making sure that we meet our obligations that we’ve talked about for years,” said Turzai in a speech to committee members Saturday. He mentioned the law among a laundry list of accomplishments made by the GOP-run legislature.
“Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation — abortion facility regulations — in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”

Voter suppression: the ONLY way that Willard has any chance of winning.

Miami-Dade absentee ballot- fraud probe expands
Miami Herald (FL), by Patricia Mazzei

Investigators looking into possible vote fraud in Hialeah are now examining at least 31 absentee ballots collected by a suspected ballot broker in two separate instances last week, according to sources familiar with the expanding probe.

Last week, Miami-Dade detectives questioned a Hialeah woman named Daisy Cabrera, who was found in possession of at least a dozen absentee ballots belonging to other voters. Detectives have also learned of another instance in which Cabrera collected ballots from voters, the sources said.

In all, 31 ballots have been segregated at the Miami-Dade elections department, where the ballots are set aside along with their envelopes bearing the names and addresses of the voters who cast the ballots. Miami-Dade detectives have interviewed many of those voters over the past few days to determine if the ballots correspond to the voters’ intentions, the sources said.

Read more here: http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpol ... rylink=cpy

Voter suppression: the ONLY way that Willard has any chance of winning.

Voter ID rules protect
seniors, minorities from
fraudsters, says new study
Daily Caller, by Neil Munro

Criminal justice data shows that blacks and poor people are the most common victims of voter fraud and are the greatest beneficiaries of voter identification rules, according to a new study.

The courtroom evidence “completely contradicts the [progressive claim] that blacks, seniors, college students and other disadvantages groups are being victimized,” said Horace Cooper, an adjunct fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

“The truth is … [that] the criminals — more often than not — are Democrats violating the rights of people who tend to be black or senior,” he told The Daily Caller.


A large investigation in Virginia, for example, showed that 30 percent of fraud allegations were centered in Richmond, which has the highest percentage of African-Americans in the state. In the state a wide investigation of voter fraud produced criminal charges against 38 people.

Good voter identification procedures would reduce that fraudulent voting, and aid minorities most, Cooper said.

The new study damages progressives’ claims that the popular demand for voter identification laws mask a GOP effort to suppress the vote of racial and ethnic minorities who support Democratic candidates.


Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/02/voter ... z22PLvpiBf