Florida-- Incompatibility

Yesterday Charles Hugh Smith asked about the incompatibility between democracy and unrestricted capitalism (of the Ayn Rand/Paul Ryan variety) but there's a different type of incompatibility going on in Florida-- the incompatibility between conservatism and democracy. Watch Rachel Maddow explaining it in the video above, from her Wednesday show on MSNBC.

"Here is a wild card, though: Rick Scott's administration can't actually directly kick voters off the rolls. They're not in charge of the rolls. All they can do is send purge lists to the counties, to county election supervisors, and tell the people who work at the county level that they're supposed to kick people off the rolls.

"It is up to the county, to the county officials, to actually do the purging, because they're responsible for elections in their counties. And lately the county officials in Florida are not much in a mood for what the state is telling them to do. On Friday, local elections officials in Florida announced that they would be discontinuing the state directed voter purge, because they found the state's data to be flawed. Oh, and also, there was that whole thing where the Justice Department said what the state's doing is illegal.

"The president of the state's association of supervisors of elections told the Palm Beach Post on Friday that the Justice Department's letter and mistakes that the county elections officials had found in the state's purge list, frankly, made the purge undoable: 'There are just too many variables with this entire process at this time for supervisors to continue.'

"Rick Scott can thumb his nose at the Justice Department, but he cannot force local elections officials in Florida to carry out his voter purge."

So while Rick Scott, a convicted criminal himself before he was elected, is running what is widely considered the most corrupt state government in America, he is doubling down on "cleansing" the Florida voting rolls of as many Democrats as he can before the November election.

With Florida leading the nation in federal public corruption convictions over the past decade, a watchdog group Wednesday urged the state Legislature to give more investigative power to the state’s Commission on Ethics.

...The report concluded that Florida had 781 public corruption convictions between 2000 and 2010, tops in the nation. California and Texas were close behind, with New York fourth. But Florida’s corruptions history also contributed to it having three cities listed this year among Forbes’ magazine’s ‘most miserable,’ with Miami #1, West Palm Beach #4 and Fort Lauderale #7.

This kind of corruption inevitably leads to a fascist-like disdain for democracy and that's exactly what we're seeing now among Florida elected Republicans. In a powerful editorial on Thursday, The Ledger didn't beat around the bush-- not for one second.

The Republican strategy to retain majority-party control of Florida is simple and straightforward: to prevent as many people as possible from voting.

To that end the Legislature has rewritten the state's election laws to make the act of registering and voting more difficult-- especially for demographic groups that tend to vote Democrat-- and to criminalize voter-registration drives.

Meanwhile Gov. Rick Scott has ordered a selective purging of voter rolls that seems tailored to winnow out Hispanics and minorities.

Will the strategy succeed? Perhaps not. Timely federal intervention arrived in two different forms last week.

First, Federal District Court Judge Robert L. Hinkle, in Miami, issued a temporary injunction against enforcement of an especially egregious part of the law that requires voter-registration-drive participants turn in completed registration forms within 48 hours, on pain of heavy fines.

That requirement has forced the League of Women Voters and other advocacy groups to suspend voter enrollment campaigns they have been conducting for years.

Hinkle called Florida's restrictions so "harsh and impractical" and "burdensome" that they are likely to be deemed unconstitutional.

Then the other federal shoe dropped in the form of a letter from the U.S. Justice Department calling on Florida to halt its purging of voter rolls.

"Federal officials said that the procedures the state is using to identify non-U.S. citizens have not been reviewed to make sure they are not discriminatory," the letter said.

State election officials have come up with a list of 182,000 registered voters who may not be U.S. citizens. So far, the names of 2,600 registered voters have been sent to supervisors of elections for possible purging.

But the state's list has been so riddled with errors that some supervisors are ignoring it.

The timing of the purge, just three months before the primary election, is especially suspect. Why didn't the governor order an examination of the voter rolls a year ago? Why now?

Both the temporary restraining order and the Justice Department's intervention are welcome developments. The Republican strategy to solidify its hold on political power in Florida is as blatant as it is undemocratic.

There's a fine line between "undemocratic" and anti-democratic... and Rick Scott and the Florida Republican Party have crossed it. The Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections, Deborah Clark, is a Republican. And she's well aware of the implications of what her party leaders are attempting to do. She won't have any part of it and has gone public in denouncing the data Scott is sending out as a pretext for his voter purge as "unreliable." This morning the Miami Herald reported that she isn't alone.

Florida’s noncitizen voter purge looks like it’s all but over.

The 67 county elections supervisors-- who have final say over voter purges-- are not moving forward with the purge for now because nearly all of them don’t trust the accuracy of a list of nearly 2,700 potential noncitizens identified by the state’s elections office.The U.S. Department of Justice has ordered the state to stop the purge.

“We’re just not going to do this,” said Leon County’s elections supervisor, Ion Sancho, one of the most outspoken of his peers. “I’ve talked to many of the other supervisors and they agree. The list is bad. And this is illegal.”