O
ne of Gov. Rick Scott’s priorities during his time in office has been to make it more difficult for Floridians to vote.
Scott gained national notoriety for his 2012 voter purge: He and his allies in the Florida Division of Elections attempted to invalidate the voter registrations of more than 2,500 Floridians prior to the presidential election.
Scott claimed that his goal was to remove noncitizens from Florida’s voter registration system. However, further investigation revealed that almost every single person on his list was in fact a U.S. citizen fully eligible to vote. Unsurprisingly, the list contained a disproportionate number of African Americans, Hispanics and other traditionally Democratic-leaning groups.
In April, a federal court ruled that Scott’s voter purge violated the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits removing individuals from the voter rolls within 90 days of an election.
Now Scott is back to his old voter suppression tricks. Last week, Scott’s campaign mailed out pamphlets to thousands of Florida households claiming that they should have already received their absentee ballots.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, election supervisors characterized the mailing as incorrect. In fact, the first day absentee ballots could have been mailed out was Sept. 30. In many cities, absentee ballots will not be mailed out until Tuesday, exactly four weeks before the November election.
Although the distribution of these mailings is not necessarily a voter suppression tactic, the misleading information they contain will no doubt make the voting process more difficult for a significant number of Floridians. Some recipients of the mailing, frustrated with the confusion about the absentee ballot process, may simply throw their hands up and forego voting altogether.
Scott is trying to make voting in Florida more difficult because he knows he has lost public support. If traditionally low-turnout groups like African Americans and Hispanics vote in droves, Scott doesn’t have a chance of being re-elected.
The governor is not alone in his use of these tactics. Mailings that foster voter suppression are becoming a national trend.
In North Carolina, Americans for Prosperity, a group supported by the Koch brothers, is under investigation for sending out voter registration mailers riddled with bad information. The group has been investigated for similar violations in Wisconsin.
The actual statistics about voter fraud in the U.S. are often discussed when the issue of voter suppression comes up, but they bear repeating. From 2000 to 2014, about 31 legitimate cases of voter fraud were uncovered out of more than one billion ballots cast. That’s .0000031 percent of all votes.
Put simply, voter fraud is not a problem in the U.S., and it is certainly not an issue that justifies making the voting process more difficult for thousands of Florida voters as Scott has done.
All Americans deserve an equal opportunity to voice their opinions at the ballot box. Scott should spend less time trying to suppress the vote and more time listening to the needs and concerns of ordinary Floridians.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 10/2/2014]
