The Florida Department of State on Friday confirmed that it has forwarded complaints about voter registration fraud that have been filed against the Democrats, as well as against two groups — the Florida New Majority Education Fund and National Council of La Raza/Democracia USA.
Neither the agency nor the Florida Department of Law Enforcement would comment on the extent of the allegations or on how many voter registration forms it involves.
Lee County Supervisor of Elections Sharon Harrington confirmed that a complaint regarding voter registration forms had come from her county, but declined further comment.
One of the biggest complaints that has been leveled against voter ID laws is that they are aimed particularly at “in person” voter fraud; and that other forms of fraud would go unchecked.
The problem is that Democrats have fought tooth and nail to prevent any clean elections policies from being enacted, not just voter ID laws. Florida has been particularly susceptible to electioneering errors – we all remember 2000. The New York Times, describing a Pew Center report this year, reported:
The report found that there are about 1.8 million dead people listed as active voters. Some 2.8 million people have active registrations in more than one state. And 12 million registrations have errors serious enough to make it unlikely that mailings based on them will reach voters.
What seems clear is that many people who are eligible to vote and want to do so fail because of flaws in the registration rolls. In 2008, roughly “2.2 million votes were lost because of registration problems,” according to a report from the Voting Technology Project of the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
When Florida governor Rick Scott attempted to clean up the entire process earlier this year, progressives pounced. ThinkProgress called the registration clean-up “suppression.” DailyKos called it a “purge.” And President Obama’s Department of Justice sued the state of Florida, halting their registration clean-up efforts.
It’s a fact that voter registration rolls are a mess throughout the United States, and there are mass-registration organizations that have done shoddy and sloppy registration work in the past. We would all think, given Florida’s shady history with voting irregularities in the past, that efforts to make elections clean and fair would be welcomed.
