Division of Elections validating voter lists

Historic City News reported when St Johns County Supervisor of Elections, Vicky Oakes, traveled to Jacksonville on October 4, to participate in a Project Integrity roundtable with Secretary of State, Ken Detzner, and other area supervisors of elections, to discuss the coming purge of non-citizens from Florida voter registration rolls.

After the 1998 debacle over the $4 million state contract with a private business, DBT Online, its successor ChoicePoint, and its successor Lexis-Nexis; the Secretary said his plan will work.

Utilizing only federal government data obtained through a “memorandum of agreement”, Secretary Detzner said, “Those names that come back with alien identification numbers are those cases that will be managed, one case at a time, with Homeland Security.” Detzner described the process yesterday at the Capitol saying, “It won’t be a data-exchange process — it will be a case-management process; where each file is reviewed by two staff people at the Department of State and individuals at the Department of Homeland Security.”

Detzner is optimistic; and Oakes told Historic City News that she is still learning, but goes along with what she heard in Jacksonville. The database, “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements”, was not made available to the state last year, or when former Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired the private firm in 1998 to vet the rolls for registered felons.

An attempt at purging the rolls of ineligible voters last year, directed by Governor Rick Scott, fizzled amid harsh criticism from Florida Democrats; who call it a thinly disguised attempt at “suppressing” minority voters.

Local elections officials, who have to make the final decision on deleting a registration from the voting rolls, will begin the statewide search for ineligible voters by matching voter rolls “on a very small-batch basis” comparing state driver-license records and other data to the federal information. County elections supervisors are currently working with Detzner’s department on details for security clearances so their staff can tap into the system. The exact “start date” is not yet known.

“The legislators told me that we have a duty under Florida law to make sure that all people on the voting rolls are eligible voters,” Detzner said. “People, the voters of Florida, have told me they don’t want ineligible people to negate or neutralize their votes.”