THE US federal government has granted Florida election officials access to a database of non-citizen residents for use in Republican-backed efforts to remove people who are not US citizens from voter registration rolls.
The decision by the department of homeland security, which came after efforts by the Obama administration to block access, was issued in a letter to governor Rick Scott’s administration and made public on Saturday.
Mr Scott, along with the state’s Republicans, had been pushing for months to gain access to the database, which is maintained by the department, arguing that it would allow for a more accurate review of voter lists.
The decision could give a boost to what has become a broad push by Republicans in several states to prevent voter fraud by expunging what they say are thousands of ineligible non-citizens from voter lists.
Opponents of the Republican effort, who recognise that people who are not US citizens have no right to vote, have argued that the federal database, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (Save), was never intended to be used for purging voter lists. They have also said that the purge could violate voters’ rights laws and be used to discriminate against minorities. With so little time left before elections, they argue, anyone wrongfully purged could be barred from voting anyway.
In June, Florida election officials were forced to halt the search for illegally registered voters amid fears that the lists of suspected non-citizens were deemed outdated and inaccurate.
But a few weeks later, a federal judge struck down a justice department request to halt the voter review indefinitely.
Mr Scott has insisted that the review was directed solely at preventing ineligible voters from participating in coming elections, including a primary on August 14th. He called the decision to grant access to the database a “step in the right direction”.
Florida is not the first state to gain access to the Save database. The letter granting Florida permission to use it says that five counties in Arizona are now doing so. Colorado has also sought access to the database as part of an effort to cleanse voter lists. The programme provides immigration status information from more than 100 million records maintained by the department of homeland security.
Civil liberties and voters’ rights groups said that while access to the database could provide more accurate information about ineligible voters, the presence of non-citizens on voter lists was likely negligible.
“It’s possible to imagine a few limited scenarios in which this could occur,” said Ben Hovland of the Fair Elections Legal Network, a nonpartisan advocacy group. “I think the amount of effort some states are dedicating to this is really a shame when those efforts could go to encouraging citizens to vote.”
There were also fears that a new push to purge the voter lists in Florida ahead of the August primary and November general elections could lead to mistakes that give wrongly-expunged people little time to address the error. Howard Simon of the Florida branch of the American Civil Liberties Union said that his and other groups would likely seek an injunction to halt any review until after this election cycle.
– (New York Times)