Another Voter Registration Issue

Florida has another voter registration issue. Namely they know that there are at least 30,000 voters registered who should be purged from the rolls because they are convicted felons. Now some (5,600) are still in prison, so they will presumably be unable to vote—though ACORN has been working to get absentee ballots to those in prison who are eligible to vote. But the rest are presumably out in the public and will be able to vote in November even though they are ineligible.

This is according to research done by the Sun Sentinel. According to that article the reason is due to increased workload in the Secretary of State’s office:

Click “more” for quotes and the link to ACORN (surprised?)

Florida’s elections chief, Secretary of State Kurt Browning, acknowledged his staff has failed to remove thousands of ineligible felons because of a shortage of workers and a crush of new registrations in this critical swing state.

Browning said he was not surprised by the newspaper’s findings. “I’m kind of shocked that the number is as low as it is,” he said.

Asked how many ineligible felons may be on Florida’s rolls, Browning said, “We don’t know.”

The Division of Elections has a backlog of more than 108,000 possible felons who have registered to vote since January 2006 that it hasn’t had the time or staff to verify. Browning estimated that about 10 percent, once checked, would be ineligible.

So why is the workload so high? Well, among other reasons, you can point back to ACORN. For instance, Florida Today reports that ACORN submitted 1,320 voter registrations in Brevard County between October 3rd through 6th. Of those it appears that 67% are probably duplicates and 23 applications have been submitted to the State Attorney’s office for investigation for fraud.

One of the implications of ACORN’s activities is that they are overloading election officials with work to weed out the garbage. This allows at least some of the ineligible voters to vote. By the way, this is a tactic directly out of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”.

RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)

It looks to me like we are going to have to address third party registrations.