Things just got real in the Sunshine State.
“I have a job to do to defend the right of legitimate voters,” [FL Gov. Rick] Scott told Fox News on Monday. “We’ve been asking for the Department of Homeland Security’s database, SAVE, for months, and they haven’t given it to us. So this afternoon, we will be filing a lawsuit, the secretary of State of Florida, against the Department of Homeland Security to give us that database. We want to have fair, honest elections in our state and we have been put in a position that we have to sue the federal government to get this information.”
Last week, the Department of Justice demanded Florida stop the voter-roll purge, saying it violated the federal Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act, and was reliant on faulty Department of Motor Vehicle records to determine who is eligible to vote.
The Scott administration responded with a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder saying it would continue the voter-roll purge, and is now seeking the DHS federal database as a part of that push.
Minor correction for The Hill. Access to the SAVE database, which is what Florida is apparently seeking in the lawsuit, isn’t new. Florida has wanted access to that database from the beginning, according to FL Secretary of State Pam Bondi, because SAVE is the most accurate database of resident aliens in the US. Florida asked for that access last year but DHS denied it, then the Obama DOJ turned around and told Florida not to clean up its voter rolls at all. Florida’s new move puts access to the database front and center in its quest to clean up its voter rolls, or at least that’s how I’m reading it.
Flashback: We shouldn’t forget who started the fire here. It wasn’t Florida, it was radical Elise Shore at the DOJ.
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