Rick Scott Defends Voter Purge As Part Of “Good Process”

As a group of civil rights and voting rights groups filed another lawsuit against Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) error-riddled and likely illegal attempt to purge people his administration said were non-citizen voters from the voter rolls, the continued to go all-in on the effort.

Scott told reporters yesterday that even though his list contained hundreds of names of legitimate and eligible U.S. citizen voters, even if they were improperly removed from the voting rolls, that would be no problem.

MSNBC reports:

“Your vote’s always going to count,” Scott said, saying that he speaks from experience. Scott revealed during a radio interview last week that he voted by provisional ballot during two elections in 2006 because an election worker in Naples confused him for a man who had died. “They just said I got to vote on a provisional ballot,” Scott told reporters Tuesday. “The nice thing about our state – when something like that happens, we have a good process. So my vote still counted.”

But just because voters may vote by a backup system — provisional balloting — doesn’t make his purge legal or appropriate. In the last presidential election, the majority of Florida provisional ballots were not counted. And forcing legitimate voters — including Gov. Scott himself — to jump through hoops to prove their eligibility because the state relies on wildly inaccurate data is anything but a “good process.”

The Voting Rights Act and National Voter Registration Act exist to protect legitimate voters from having their right to vote abridged. While Scott is attempting to use the fact that his own right to to vote was improperly called into question as an justification for doing the same to other voters, the fact that his provisional vote ultimately counted would be of little context to those whose legitimate votes might not be counted.