Politics
Probing Voter Fraud, Tea Party Tells Eric Holder to Stand Aside
Around the State
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"From what we can see, the feds have stonewalled the state by not sharing information about noncitizens in our state," said Billie Tucker, head of the First Coast Tea Party in Jacksonville.
Tea partiers say they will actively resist U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's recent demand that Florida stop purging noncitizens from the voter lists.
"We've had a lot of people researching this for the last three years. If feds won't give us the information, we'll get it ourselves," Tucker vowed.
Working with Texas-based True the Vote, the tea party coalition is ramping up an investigation similar to a Fort Myers TV station's report that compared jury lists with voter lists. That comparison found that several noncitizens disqualified from jury duty turned up on the local voter rolls.
“I vote every year,” Hinako Dennett told NBC2. The Cape Coral resident is not a U.S, citizen, yet she’s registered to vote.
Holder's Justice Department has warned Florida against any "purging" of the voter rolls until the state submits a plan and receives federal approval 90 days before implementation.
"The state did just that and the DoJ stonewalled," complained a tea party activist who declined to be identified.
"Much like illegal immigration, the law is kept on the books, as a nod to public opinion, but states will be sued if they actually enforce the law."
Tucker says the tea party coalition, whose members she numbers in the "hundreds," will proceed with their probe, and that local supervisors of elections need to cooperate.
"There are good supervisors of elections and not-so-great ones," Tucker told Sunshine State News. "The ones who aren't cooperative will not win at the next election.
"They will be under our magnifying glass," asserted Tucker, who said the coalition is zeroing in on "more than a dozen" counties with high concentrations of noncitizens. She declined to identify the counties.
Liberal and libertarian groups see the problem differently. They point to federal courts that have blocked some of Florida's attempts at tightening voter-registration drives.
"The real fraud is in the counts. We need to go to paper ballots and public counts," says Alexander Snitker, the Libertarian Party's 2010 candidate for U.S. Senate.
Vicki Davis, president of the state Supervisors of Elections Association, said her group was not taking a formal position on the tea party initiative.
Davis, who is the supervisor of elections in Martin County, noted that the tea party investigators face a tough job.
"Jury lists are different throughout the state. Martin is all on paper. Clerks said they would have to manually go back and look when we asked because there is nothing in the database to flag noncitizens," Davis related.
But Davis shared the concern over the integrity of the voter rolls.
"The Department of State has been requesting access for a year to the federal SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) file," she noted. That request has gone nowhere.
The tea party group wants to make it clear it is not engaging in what Democrats and other left-wing groups broadly brand "voter suppression."
"We want everyone to vote who can vote legally," Tucker explained. "We just do not want to be caught in political maneuvering -- and used as pawns for some political purpose.
"If we don't have true and fair elections, we're lost as a country."
Contact Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 801-5341.
Comments (14)
So, now four months later, has Hinako Dennett been arrested for illegally voting, or is there more to the story? Has the Scott administration been too focused on voter suppression to make the effort to deal with a "real" case of voter fraud?
Heh, but you know what, all this fuss and we've so far discovered 3 illegal voters voting out of 11 million. What a success rate!
Well worth attempting to remove 492 legal voters in Miami-Dade alone.
Yes, this is a very good list . . . . if you desire to remove minority, typically Democratic voters before the November election.
And I would warn the True the Vote group about bringing their past "poll protection" efforts to Florida. If you do what you did in parts of Texas, you'll once again appear before a judge, only this time you'll likely end up in jail in Florida.
As a legally registered voter, I take it as a personal affront, that a political party (democrats) in The United States, will not assert itself and say that illegal voters must be purged from the rolls.
Oh, that's right, I forget that their Presidential candidate needs continued birther Trump's money. Money over Ethics.
Of course not, because you have NO evidence do you, just something you think you heard somewhere somehow somewhen, and something that's been shown to be a lie.
If you, or Donald Trump, really had such evidence, why aren't you in court. Oh, I know why, because it would get thrown out as a frivolous lawsuit.
If that's too big a word, it means, among other meanings, a case based on absurd legal theories.
Because such a claim wastes the court's and other parties' time, legal fees and sanctions may be imposed by a court upon the party or the lawyer who presents the frivolous claim, including being held in contempt.
Don't want to pay up or go to jail do you?
It appears to me that Eric Holder and Homeland Security have an alternative motive here and it is not to protect the integrity of our election process. Clerk of courts and supervisors of elections should not be combative in this quest as it actually takes the pressure off of them and puts it squarely on the backs of the Justice Department.
Finally, the Republican Party of Florida, Federated Republican Women of Florida, James Madison Institute and Americans for Prosperity Florida should all join in the endeavor. Several state their purpose is to educate the voters and what better way to do that than to expose non citizens voting in our state.
And remember, Eric Holder is the one who sees no problem with quasi-armed poll watchers. Maybe Holder is the one who needs exorcism but I'm not sure there's a power sufficient to change his evil mind.
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