The Republican Party of Florida isn’t waiting for former governor Charlie Crist to declare himself a Democrat and take on Gov. Rick Scott in 2014.

The party sent out a blistering email late Tuesday, pointing to Crist’s failures to keep ineligible voters from going to the polls while Florida’s attorney general, and that he opposed Democrat Bill Clinton’s effort to expand voter registration.  

The attack comes just days after Crist wrote a critique of Gov. Rick Scott’s effort to remove non-U.S. citizens from the lists of registered voters.

"Charlie Crist demonstrates he has two faces,” the RPOF email blasts. “One is the face of what he says, and the other is his record."

In a piece posted on the Washington Post website on July 20, Crist chimed in that when he was Florida’s attorney general, any actions he took against illegal voting were undertaken “out of respect for our democracy.”

He called Scott’s effort to remove noncitizens “un-American” and an “example of a mean-spirited and all-too-partisan attempt to restrict access to the rolls and to the polls.”

“I’m concerned that zealots overreacting to contrived threats of voter fraud by significantly narrowing the voting pool are doing so with brazen disrespect and disregard for our greatest traditions.”

An ad accompanying the RPOF email -- titled “The Two Faces of Charlie Crist” -- noted that in 2004 Crist “supported releasing a massive purge list to disclose a list of 47,000 Floridians to remove them from the voter rolls.”

Tallahassee public relations giant Ron Sachs has noted that the Democrats don’t have many players to call from the bench to take on Crist.

Currently, Senate Minority Leader Nan Rich, D-Sunrise, is the only announced candidate to take on Scott, who will again be well-funded in 2014, even if he refrains from dipping into his own piggy bank.

“We have a governor who’s got awful polling numbers, and there’s no other Democrats talking about running,” Democratic strategist Screven Watson told Mike Vasalinda Productions.

The column wasn’t Crist’s first criticizing efforts to reform voting in Florida this year.

Crist wrote in April in the Tampa Bay Times that the new voting registration and early voting rules “appear to be a step backward in protecting the right to vote for citizens of the Sunshine State.”

Crist, a Republican who forwent a run for a second term as governor in order to run for U.S. Senate, became an independent in 2010 to avoid a primary with Marco Rubio, R-Miami. Crist's wife registered as a Democrat earlier this year.



Reach Jim Turner at jturner@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 215-9889.