REPUBLICANS REALLY DO STEAL ELECTIONS,
AND THEY'RE DAMNED GOOD AT IT, TOO

From Think Progress:

Florida Supervisor of Elections: Gov. Scott’s Voter
Purge Will Remove Eligible Voters From Rolls

According to the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, eligible voters will be removed from the voting rolls as a result of the massive voter purge ordered by Governor Rick Scott. “It will happen,” Mary Cooney, a spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, told ThinkProgress.

Late last year, Governor Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” Browning could not get access to reliable citizenship data. So Scott urged election officials to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing data from the state motor vehicle administration with the voting file.

That process produced a massive list of 182,000 names, which Browning considered unreliable. The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.” Further, some voters may have naturalized since their driver’s license information was collected.

Browning resigned in February. But Scott has pressed forward with his efforts to purge voters from the rolls based on the dubious list.

More here.

It's deja vu all over again.

This is the same scheme they employed to steal Florida back in 2000, except instead of using felons as an excuse to cast as wide a net as possible, this time they're using immigration status. Same difference. Get the brown people off the voter rolls so only angry white people get to vote.

What, you don't remember the racist scam that illegally installed George W. Bush in the White House twelve years ago? No doubt, that's because the US press, for reasons unknown, totally ignored the story. But the long and short of it is that the foreign press was all over it, which is how the NAACP knew that they should sue the state of Florida for illegally disenfranchising tens of thousands of innocent black voters who very likely would have voted for Gore. The punchline, of course, was that the state of Florida, rather than having all the GOP's filthy laundry exposed in court for all to see, settled out of court. The US press ignored that, too, but, trust me, it definitely happened.

Now they're trying to do it again. And who can blame them? They more or less got away with it the first time scot-free. The Republican Party was probably in too much disarray back in 2008 to try something like this with McCain, but the Tea Party movement has apparently given them back their balls, and our current President's black skin is probably providing some motivation, too. After all, this new scam, like the one from 2000, is aimed at stripping voting rights away from people of color. Kill two birds with one stone: fuck over the black President; fuck over those nasty filthy brown foreigners who don't speak English.

As longtime Real Art readers know, I have for years believed our democracy to be a total sham. Corporations and other wealthy interests have bought the political class in full. But there are other ways to destroy democracy, and the GOP has gotten really good at it. I mean, just add this Florida scam to all these voter ID laws coming out of Republican dominated state legislatures around the country, and you have a full court press on citizens' ability to vote. Call me old fashioned, but, even in spite of corporate interference in the political process, I still think the right to vote has some pretty deep meaning and significance to Americans. Suppressing the vote is, consequently, just about as anti-American as you can get.

And that's where the modern Republican Party is today, totally anti-American.

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