On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it was filing a lawsuit against Florida over the state’s push to clean its voter roles of dead and foreign voters. The move comes on the heels of Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, scheduling a vote by his panel on June 20th aimed at holding U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents in the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal. While the corrupt practices of Holder’s DOJ may finally be getting the attention they deserve, it is also becoming apparent that the department is not just degrading the principles of law and order to advance a radical leftist agenda — but to enhance president’s Obama’s re-election chances by any means necessary.
The DOJ’s lawsuit against Florida is little more than the latest evidence of the highly politicized nature of the department and the man at its helm. As mentioned above, the state has been singled out for attempting to purge its voter rolls of non-citizens. Yet as testimony by former DOJ attorney J. Christian Adams to the House of Representatives revealed, the department has taken exactly the opposite approach with other states, “deliberately refusing to enforce Section 8 and require states to purge rolls because of philosophical disagreement with the purging statute.” He further testified that during his time in the Voting Section, “political appointees expressed open and outright hostility to enforcing Section 8.”
The DOJ’s sudden interest in enforcing Section 8 in Florida rests on two contentions. One, that Florida has conducted its effort “within the 90-day quiet period before an election for federal office established by the law” and that “Florida’s use of inaccurate and unreliable voter verification procedures violates the requirement in Section 8 of the NVRA that any such program be uniform and nondiscriminatory.”
Both contentions are easily debunked. On Tuesday, Republican Governor Rick Scott revealed that Florida has been forced to use state databases to cleanse voter rolls because the Department of Homeland Security has refused to allow his state access to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), a national immigration database needed to confirm citizenship status. According to Scott, the DHS has stonewalled the state for nine months. This undercuts both of the DOJ’s arguments, even as it reveals the Orwellian nature of an Obama administration willing to deny Florida a more reliable database and timely access to it, while suing the state for “violations” it forced the state to preform.
Scott has taken notice. He announced that Florida will file suit for access. “We’ve done all the right things,” he said in an appearance on CNN’s “Starting Point.” “We’re put in a position where we don’t have a choice but to sue them to get access to a database…to make sure that your right as a citizen is not diluted by a non-citizen.” Scott also revealed the critical reason why. “We tried to use our own database to do it…even with that database, we’ve found 100 people not entitled to vote and we know 50 of them have voted.”
Florida is only the latest example of the blatant prejudice that emanates from the DOJ. Both Texas and South Carolina are being sued for enacting voter photo ID statutes despite a 6-3 ruling by the United States Supreme in 2008 upholding Indiana’s right to require such identification for voting. This implies that Eric Holder and company believe each state must file individual suits before SOTUS to achieve the same right.