YES!!!! Rick Scott Strikes Out Again: Federal Court Blocks Florida Attack On Early Voting
Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) has been relentless in his push to restrict the right to vote. He’s advanced an illegal voter purge that would have disproportionately impacted the minority citizens in his state. And a federal court blocked his effort to suppress voter registration last May. On Thursday, a federal court in Washington, DC concluded that another part of Scott’s anti-voting agenda cannot take effect because the state’s new restrictions on early voting negatively impact minority communities.
Last year, the Republican-controlled legislature cut Florida’s number of early voting days down from 8 to 12. However, because minority communities tend to utilize early voting days, the federal court ruled that fewer options for early voting “would make it materially more difficult for some minority voters to cast a ballot.” The court rejected the state’s early voting changes based on their discriminatory impact:
We conclude that we cannot preclear Florida’s early voting changes at this time because the State has failed to satisfy its burden of proving that those changes will not have a retrogressive effect on minority voters if the covered counties offer only the minimum number of early voting hours required under the new statute, which would constitute only half the hours required under the prior law.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/17/704761/rick-scott-strikes-out-again-federal-court-blocks-florida-attack-on-early-voting/
These Federal rulings can effect other State/Federal rulings.
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I'm shaking some cobwebs loose here, but I seem to remember that back in 2000, she allowed 3000 absentee ballots to be counted even though they came in with-out signatures. They were signed (illegally) by election officials and should have been thrown out, but she let them be counted because she ruled that the election officials didn't mean to break the law. Or something equally lame. Between her and Ken Blackwell in Ohio in 2004, do you think we've learned to NOT let the person who's running the campaign for one of the candidates be responsible for counting the votes?
