“Ruling Revives Florida Review of Voting Rolls”

NYT: “Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, newly empowered by the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in June that struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, has ordered state officials to resume a fiercely contested effort to remove noncitizens from voting rolls.”

I just want to remind readers what I said about looking for noncitizen voting in the NY Times before the election:

While Republicans have been more to blame than Democrats, partisanship runs both ways. Democrats reflexively oppose efforts to deal with ineligible voters casting ballots, likely out of fear that the new requirements will make it harder for casual voters supporting Democrats to cast a ballot. They have adamantly opposed the efforts of Florida and other states where Republican election officials want to remove noncitizens from the voting rolls. Noncitizen voting is a real, if small, problem: a Congressional investigation found that some noncitizens voted in the close 1996 House race in California between Robert K. Dornan, a Republican, and Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat, but not enough to affect the outcome. Unlike impersonation fraud, noncitizen voting cannot be dismissed as a Republican fantasy.

We need to move beyond these voting wars by creating a neutral body to run federal elections and to ensure that all eligible voters, and only eligible voters, can cast a vote that will be accurately counted on Election Day. The agency could start with a program to register all eligible voters and provide a free national voter ID card with an optional thumbprint to prove identity.

But we are very far from such a comprehensive solution. Congress took a baby step toward uniformity in 2002 when it created the Election Assistance Commission to advise states. But the commission was hobbled from the start by inadequate financing and opposition from some state officials. Today, three months before the election, all four of its seats are vacant.

Sadly, broader bipartisan compromise appears unlikely. Short of a grand solution, we need a moratorium on additional partisan changes to election rules that cannot be implemented before November without a significant risk of disenfranchisement. The courts should put Pennsylvania’s law on hold, and Florida should hold off on its plan to remove noncitizens until the off-season. Purging the rolls now risks removing many more eligible citizens than noncitizens.

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