Stopping Non-Citizens From Voting

People who are not American citizens do not have the right to vote in American elections. Sounds pretty logical to me. Well, it isn’t logical to everyone.

Fox News reported Saturday that the Federal Government will allow Florida access to a federal database to prevent voter fraud. The Department of Homeland Security maintains a Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database that would allow Florida to cross-check its voter registration in order to eliminate people who are not qualified to vote.

The article reports:

Voting rights groups, while acknowledging that non-citizens have no right to vote, have expressed alarm about using such data for a purpose not originally intended — purging voter lists of ineligible people. They also said voter purges less than four months before a presidential election might leave insufficient time to correct mistakes.

Democrats say that the government’s concession is less troubling than Texas and other GOP-run states pushing to require voters to show photo identification at polling places.

The Texas case was heard in federal court this week by a three-judge panel, and a decision is expected by the end of August.

Colorado and other states have asked for similar access to SAVE.

The article reports some of the history of this issue in Florida:

In June, the Justice Department sued the Scott administration on grounds that the state’s voter-purge efforts violated voting rights laws.

The suit against the state and Secretary of State Ken Detzner alleged Florida violated its obligations under the federal National Voter Registration Act by conducting a “systematic program to purge voters from its rolls within the 90-day quiet period before an election for federal office.”

The Obama Administration seems to make a habit of suing states that pass laws that the Administration does not like. It seems to me that purging voter rolls before an election is a good idea–there should be time to correct mistakes, but I suspect that, with access to a federal data base, those mistakes should be infrequent.