Saying the Department of Justice
is protecting illegal noncitizen voters more than lawful ones, Gov.
Rick Scott’s administration Wednesday bluntly refused a federal demand
that it stop hunting and purging noncitizens from Florida’s voter rolls.

In
a sharply worded four-page letter, Scott’s administration also argued
that the Justice Department doesn’t understand two federal voting laws
at the heart of the dispute and accused another agency, the Department
of Homeland Security, of breaking yet another federal law for refusing
the state access to a federal citizenship database.

“This
hardly seems like an approach earnestly designed to protect the
integrity of elections and to ensure that eligible voters have their
votes counted,” said the letter, written by Scott’s hand-picked
secretary of state, Ken Detzner, a fellow Republican.

….”Not a single eligible voter as far, as I know, has been removed from
the voter rolls,” Republican Gov. Rick Scott said in a Wednesday
interview with WNDB radio in Daytona Beach, according to a News Service
of Florida transcript. Not one. And we’re working to keep it that way.” “Their
vote should not be diluted by people who don’t have the right to vote,”
Scott said. “We need to be reviewing our voter rolls and making sure
only those individuals who have the right to vote … are voting.”

The full story can be found here at the Tampa Bay Times.  Worth the full read.

From the Miami Herald: Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office won’t rule out suing the Department of Homeland Security for refusing to share its citizenship database with Florida’s elections division in its hunt for noncitizen voters.

“It’s disappointing that the Obama Administration has been unwilling
to help the Department of State ensure that we have accurate voter
rolls,” Bondi’s office told The Miami Herald in response to an inquiry.
“We still hope that the Department of State will be able to obtain the
Obama Administration’s cooperation without resorting to litigation, but
we’re monitoring the situation and believe Florida needs to keep all of
its options open.”

…Federal law (8 USC; 1373 to be exact),
says the “Immigration and Naturalization Service shall respond to an
inquiry by a Federal, State, or local government agency, seeking to
verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any
individual within the jurisdiction of the agency for any purpose
authorized by law, by providing the requested verification or status
information.”

With allegations of political enforcement of the law and multiple controversies, no surprises with this Rasmussen poll finding:

I suppose now the priorities are laid bare.  National Review: 

“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. . . .

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.  . . .

Herren also makes the spurious claim that removing noncitizens violates the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), popularly known as Motor Voter, because the removal is occurring within 90 days of the August 14 Florida primary. Section 8 of Motor Voter provides that a state has to complete “any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters” not later than 90 days prior to the election. . . .

The idea that Florida is violating one section of the NVRA when it removes noncitizens, who committed a felony when they violated another section of the NVRA by illegally registering, is ridiculous. The unlawful registration was void ab initio — invalid from the very beginning. . . .

If there were any doubt remaining, the left-wing ideology driving the decision about Florida is revealed in the last sentence of the Herren letter, which tells the Florida secretary of state to contact the Voting Section lawyer assigned to the case, Elise Shore.”

Republican lawmakers are renewing a push for a compromise measure that
would require voters to show identification at the polls, conceding that
voiding a veto of a tougher bill is unlikely. House Speaker Thom Tillis said he is intent on overriding more of Gov.
Bev Perdue’s vetoes before adjourning at the end of the month. But he
recently acknowledged the one hill too big to climb may be the voter ID
legislation vetoed by Perdue that would require voters to show a
driver’s license at the polls. A veto override requires a three-fifths
majority, meaning a handful of Democrats would need to side with the
Republican majority.

Link.

Supreme Court opinion.

Scalding review of the actions of the Civil Rights Division.  And one reason that Section 5 enforcement has been politicized to a point its very existence is in the balance.

The Department of Justice may be engaged in a politically motivated
attack on the state of Florida over efforts there to purge thousands of
people who may be ineligible to vote from the state’s voter rolls. “I don’t think there’s any question that in the Civil Rights Division
there’s a mindset of guilt by existence. It’s phenomenal,” conservative
attorney Joe diGenova told CNSNews.com. “If you exist and you’re in
that jurisdiction and you happen to be of one party, that’s it.”

Mr. diGenova said that this has been the case in every one of the
Justice Department’s voting enforcement cases, calling the government’s
actions a “preemptive strike” against states.

“I’m not sure what this is aimed at, other than some imagined threat
against the voting rights of minorities,” he said. “I’ve not seen a
single piece of evidence, real evidence. This appears to be a preemptive
strike to stop people from cleaning their [voter] rolls up, and it just
doesn’t make any sense.”

DiGenova, a long-time Washington, D.C.-based lawyer, told CNSNews.com
that the department’s Civil Rights Division had become the “resting
place” for liberal civil rights activists who think that “everybody’s
wrong.”

“The Civil Rights Division has become the resting place for extremely
activist individuals in the civil rights community who spend their
lives doing nothing else but this and are very active politically to
boot when they’re not in the government,” he said.

“So they have no perspective and everybody’s wrong. They have this
image that if anything happens in any area that there’s supposed to be
special scrutiny by the Justice Department, they immediately think the
worst. And there’s just no evidence that the worst or anything like it
is occurring.”

full story here.

Citizens in 22 states should be alarmed.  An amicus brief filed by
those states’ attorneys general indicates they do not believe in robust
First Amendment rights.  Instead, they urge the U.S. Supreme Court to
let state governments censor political speech and political activity.

That is, in essence, the position taken in their embarrassing brief just filed in American Tradition Partnership v Bullock, a case in which the Montana Supreme Court brazenly ignored the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. 
The Montana court reinstated a ban on independent political
expenditures by corporations—a ban that a lower court had correctly
thrown out as unconstitutional following the Citizens United ruling.

Trying to differentiate its state law from the federal ban, the
Montana Supreme Court issued a decision that is a marvel of deceptive
reasoning.  The court basically defied the Supreme Court.

More of the opinion piece by Hans von Spakovsky in Human Events.

Justice Department works to allow fraudulent votes.  Could illegal voting decide the next presidential election? Steps are being taken by the Justice Department that may help guarantee it.  Link.

link. A partisan kill of the voter ID bill.