Federal Judge Rejects DOJ's Challenge to Florida Voter Roll Clean-Up

Eric Holder’s bad week just got worse.

Judge Hinkle was not an unreserved supporter of the Florida program, but he rejected the legal basis for the DOJ challenge.  The National Voter Registration Act specifies a 90-day “safe window” before elections, in which voter registration cannot be changed by the state, but Hinkle found that this provision “did not apply to removing non-citizens from the rolls.”

He went on to say that “Determining citizenship is not as easy as the state would have it.  Questioning someone’s citizenship isn’t as trivial as the state would have it.”  Of course, the state of Florida was perfectly aware of that, which is why they attempted to gain access to the far more accurate data maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, only to be illegally refused by the Obama Administration.  That’s one of the reasons it took so long to winnow the original list of 180,000 questionable voters down to the 2,600 letters of challenge that were actually sent.  Florida’s lawsuit against the DHS over this refusal is still pending.

The post notes a bit of Obama administration lawlessness that hasn’t generated much press yet: Florida sought access to the DHS SAVE database, which DHS is required by law to provide to the states. But DHS refused to provide that access to Florida.