Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Better Purging Next Time

After bungling the last attempt to get all non-Republicans off the voter rolls of Florida, Gov. Rick Scott’s administration promises they’ll do better the next time.

In a rare display of contrition coming to a Florida city near you, Gov. Rick Scott’s administration is acknowledging what civil rights groups and local elections officials had already been saying: Last year’s attempted purge of noncitizens from voter rolls was fundamentally flawed.

“I accept responsibility for the effort,” Scott’s secretary of state, Ken Detzner, told the Herald/Times. “It could have been better. It should have been better.”

Detzner, who serves as Scott’s top elections official, is repeating the mea culpa during a five-day road tour that concludes this week in Orlando, Sarasota and Fort Lauderdale. The apology is part of a sales pitch to the public and supervisors of elections that a second attempt to remove noncitizens from voter rolls, “Project Integrity”, will be better.

“We learned from the mistakes we made,” Detzner said. “We won’t make the same mistakes.”

I feel better already.