Do we want dead people, non-citizens, and others ineligible to vote voting in our elections?

NO!  Nobody wants voter fraud.  We should make sure that voter fraud is stopped.

By the way, how big a problem is this?

Well in Florida with more than ten million voters, since 2000 the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has had 178 cases of alleged voter fraud referred to them (and only a handful resulted in convictions); around 1 in every 5,000,000 votes cast over the past 10 years.

OK, so it’s actually a very small problem – but what’s wrong with toughening the laws that prevent fraudulent voting, in order to improve the quality of our elections?

Nothing unless the way we reduce voter fraud also stops legal voters from having the right to vote, and therefore greatly harms the quality of our elections by preventing legal voters from voting.

Florida officials announced they were purging the voter rolls of 2,600 “non-citizens” with plans to remove tens of thousands of additional names.  But in the process and as reported in the Sun-Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel newspapers, they’ve swept up a war hero born in Brooklyn, plus hundreds of immigrants who have long been U.S. citizens.  Of 1,594 names sent to Miami-Dade, 447 have thus far proved they were citizens, while 13 said they were non-citizens.

Imagine it was you – suddenly your right to vote was taken away.  And you wouldn’t be able to vote again unless you took the time to prove you were a citizen – no doubt to a nightmare bureaucracy that is even worse than dealing with Motor Vehicles to register a car.

Among these identified as non-qualifying registered voters, 64% identified themselves as Hispanic (roughly 5 times the normal percentage of voters), while only 9% identified themselves as whites (normally making up 68% of all registered voters).  Only 21% reported being Republican – half the normal level.

In other words, we know that there is virtually no actual voter fraud in Florida, and we know that the new method of detecting non-qualifying registered voters is inaccurate and imprecise, and we see that the method of selecting supposedly non-qualifying registered voters ‘appears to be’ prejudicial and political, and yet this strategy continues to be overwhelmingly supported by Republican lawmakers in Florida.

These facts should be of great concern to all citizens. 

The desire to reduce voter fraud makes sense when there is voter fraud.  But a process that has been shown to be flawed and that forces many legal voters to prove that they are legal in order to regain their right to vote is obviously wrong and should not be supported by anyone.

Republicans and Democrats should debate and fight about the issues, and then let all the voters decide, and may the best ideas win.