Hans von Spakovsky, the Heritage Foundation expert who has supported voter ID legislation in North Carolina and other states, devotes a new National Review Online column to Attorney General Eric Holder’s latest indefensible action in Florida.
Time and again, the Holder Justice Department has exhibited politically driven law enforcement. But its latest instance of lawlessness is absolutely brazen. Last week, the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section sent a letter to the Florida secretary of state, Ken Detzner, ordering him to stop removing voters who are not citizens from Florida’s voter-registration rolls.
This goes far beyond Holder’s previous actions, such as belittling claims of voter fraud and trying to stop voter ID and other reform measures intended to improve the integrity of the election process. This letter would directly abet vote thieves in a key state as Holder’s boss seeks reelection this November.
According to the letter sent by Voting Section chief Chris Herren, Florida is checking its voter-registration records against state driver’s-license records to identify noncitizens. This shouldn’t have surprised anyone at Justice — after all, Florida is simply following federal law in making such a database comparison. Section 303(a) of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 specifically directs states to coordinate their voter-registration records “with other agency databases within the State” to ensure they are “accurate.” And this is serious business: Making a false claim of citizenship in order to register to vote is a felony under federal law punishable by up to three years in prison.
But none of this seems to matter to Herren, who asserted, falsely, that Florida is violating Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act because it didn’t get its review procedure “preapproved” by the Justice Department or a federal court.
