Ion Sancho, Elections Supervisor of Leon County FL, criticizes new voter-suppression bills from ALEC

[highplainsdem]

I don't think there have been any posts about Ion Sancho here for a while, so I'm going to link to the Wikipedia article about him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Sancho

He's concerned about the election laws Florida Republicans are trying to pass now. So are Democratic legislators and groups like the League of Women Voters. The Republicans have a super majority in both houses of the state legislature, and the changes in election law they're making would affect voter registration, shorten the early voting period, make it harder for third-party groups to register voters, and force people who need to make minor changes in their name and/or address on Election Day (this would especially affect students, and women whose names have changed after marriage or divorce) to cast provisional ballots instead of regular ballots.

Changes that are aimed at giving the GOP an advantage in the 2012 election.

http://www.ocala.com/article/20110420/ARTICLES/110429967?Title=Fla-House-vote-likely-Thursday-on-revamped-election-laws

Fla. House vote likely Thursday on revamped election laws

By Lloyd Dunkelberger
Tallahassee bureau

Published: Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 7:57 p.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 7:57 p.m.


-snip-

“Early voting is critical to allowing the large number of voters that we have to access the system,” Sancho said. “What the Senate is doing by cutting access to early voting by 50 percent is simply suppressing the vote.”

-snipping paragraphs about even minor changes in registration on Election Day requiring the voter to cast a provisional ballot-

In Leon County — home to two state universities — Sancho said 3,500 voters would have fallen into that category in the 2008 presidential election. And he said supervisors around the state have calculated that “tens of thousands” of voters could be impacted in next year's election if the provision becomes law.

-snipping paragraph about provisional ballots having to be counted within four days-

“This is a recipe for not counting provisional ballots and having legitimate voters' votes in Florida discarded and that's appalling given our experience in 2000,” Sancho said, referring to the disputed presidential election.

-snip-

Sancho said the election bills being moved through the Florida Legislature this year are based on proposals from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative, Washington, D.C.-based organization that provides a slate of suggested legislation to its members.

“Every state that has a Republican Legislature is doing this, from Maine to Florida,” Sancho said. “This is a national effort.”

Yes, it is...as we've been pointing out in the long compilation topic about the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

[highplainsdem]

1. More on this: "Lawmakers pushing election crackdown have yet to show why changes are needed"

http://floridaindependent.com/27571/voter-fraud-suppression-election-acorn

Lawmakers pushing election crackdown have yet to show why changes are needed
By Travis Pillow | 04.20.11 | 2:55 pm


-snip-

One provision in the bill’s 150 or so pages would impose new regulations on third-party groups that register voters, tightening their deadlines and setting them up for potentially hundreds of dollars in fines. Another would require people who change their names and addresses on election day to vote by provisional ballot.

Ion Sancho, the Leon County supervisor of elections, said he has not seen “one scintilla of evidence” that the proposed changes are necessary. In the wake of the 2000 electoral debacle, Florida invested tens of millions of dollars in a database that allows election officials to pre-screen voters before election day.

Florida now has some of the best voter registration database and picture ID laws in the country, Sancho said. Mickey Mouse would never make it onto the voter rolls, nor would any Bobby Bowdens, other than the real ones. People who change their names and addresses at the polls (which Florida has allowed since the 1970s) can be checked against the same database, meaning officials can be confidant that voters are legitimate and have not already voted in some other part of the state.

Pushing tens of thousands of voters onto provisional ballots would lead to longer lines at the polls and hamper efforts to count legitimate votes, which he said must be done within four days of a general election.

-snip-

[mod mom]

2. It's all about suppressing the Democratic vote. I don't understand how the DoJ

puts up with this shit. It targets the poor, the old & students. What about their RIGHT to vote?

"states with a history of discriminatory voting practices (so-called "covered jurisdictions") could not implement any change affecting voting without first obtaining the approval of the Department of Justice, a process known as preclearance."

WELL MY STATE OF OHIO DEMONSTRATED DISCRIMINATORY VOTING PRACTICES IN 2004 HOW ABOUT THE DOJ DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THE GOP VOTER IS LAW WHICH IS NOT BASED ON ANY REAL THREAT OF VOTER FRAUD BUT IS INTENDED TO SUPPRESS DEMOCRATIC SEGMENTS OF THE POPULATION? WHY THIS IS BEING ALLOWED BY HOLDER IS BEYOND ME!

from wiki:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. §§ 1973–1973aa-6)<1> is a landmark piece of national legislation in the United States that outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in the U.S.<2>

Echoing the language of the 15th Amendment, the Act prohibits states from imposing any "voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure ... to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color."<3> Specifically, Congress intended the Act to outlaw the practice of requiring otherwise qualified voters to pass literacy tests in order to register to vote, a principal means by which Southern states had prevented African-Americans from exercising the franchise.<2> The Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, who had earlier signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.<2><4>

The Act established extensive federal oversight of elections administration, providing that states with a history of discriminatory voting practices (so-called "covered jurisdictions") could not implement any change affecting voting without first obtaining the approval of the Department of Justice, a process known as preclearance.<5> These enforcement provisions applied to states and political subdivisions (mostly in the South) that had used a "device" to limit voting and in which less than 50 percent of the population was registered to vote in 1964.<5> The Act has been renewed and amended by Congress four times, the most recent being a 25-year extension signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2006.<6>

The Act is widely considered a landmark in civil-rights legislation,<7> though some of its provisions have sparked political controversy. During the debate over the 2006 extension, some Republican members of Congress objected to renewing the preclearance requirement (the Act's primary enforcement provision), arguing that it represents an overreach of federal power and places unwarranted bureaucratic demands on Southern states that have long since abandoned the discriminatory practices the Act was meant to eradicate.<8> Conservative legislators also opposed requiring states with large Spanish-speaking populations to provide bilingual ballots.<9> Congress nonetheless voted to extend the Act for twenty-five years with its original enforcement provisions left intact.<10>

[highplainsdem]

3. HB 1355 sponsor Dennis Baxley claims ALEC is not involved, but he's an ALEC member who's

been directly involved in other ALEC model legislation, so I don't believe him.

http://saintpetersblog.com/2011/04/election-bill-set-to-pass-after-republicans-beat-back-democratic-amendments/

Thursday, April 21st, 2011 | Posted by Peter Schorsch
Election bill set to pass after Republicans beat back Democratic amendments


-snip-

At that event, Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho blasted the bill as a copy of a model distributed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative, D.C.-based organization that provides a slate of suggested legislation to members.

“Every state that has a Republican Legislature is doing this, from Maine to Florida,” Sancho said. “This is a national effort.”

Baxley brushed aside that allegation after the vote, saying the measure was “built in the House” after discussions with staffers and elections supervisors, who have so far opposed the measure.

“I’ve never talked to about it,” Baxley said.

-snip-

Despite Baxley's attempt to deny this, it's known that he's worked with ALEC on legislation in the past, including gun legislation mentioned in this news article from the Tampa Tribune, which is no longer on their site but is quoted at length in a number of right-wing forums online -- so I'm linking to Free Republic just to get that quote:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1596449/posts

Original link for the story: http://pasco.tbo.com/pasco/MGBTC7C5QKE.html

Several States Consider 'Stand Your Ground' Bills
The Tampa Tribune ^ | Mar 13, 2006 | TODD LESKANIC

-snip-

The "Stand Your Ground" law passed easily in Tallahassee last year behind the lobbying of the NRA and other gun rights groups; experts expect the same this year in at least six other states, possibly more. The legislation is most likely to pass in Indiana, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi and Arizona, according to experts and legislators.

-snip-

State Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, presented the Florida law he sponsored as model legislation to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative organization of state legislators. The council adopted it last summer.

-snip-

Given Baxley's background, other ALEC model legislation designed to suppress voting, and what Ion Sancho said, I'll believe Sancho over Baxley (a wingnut who cited ACORN as a reason the legislation was needed, according to the article linked to in the reply above) any day.

[highplainsdem]

4. kick

[highplainsdem]

5. again

[Dappleganger]

6. This is absolutely disgusting.

Yet another reason we are steering our children to leave this fucked up state as soon as they can.

[highplainsdem]

7. Unfortunately this ALEC legislation to suppress voting is being pushed all over the country, and

it's being passed in some states controlled by Republicans. If you look at the long compilation topic on ALEC that I link to at the bottom of the OP, you'll see that the OP of the compilation topic refers to attempts to keep students from voting (among other ALEC legislation). It was a Campus Progress article, and a blog about it at Forbes, that first made me aware of who was behind much of this right-wing legislative onslaught. It looked coordinated, and it is. Lots of very harmful right-wing cookie-cutter legislation, designed to make corporations and the rich happy, steal from the middle class and poor, and reduce the chances of Democrats winning future elections. They've been planning this for decades, but it's only recently that they've had enough political power to try to get so much harmful legislation passed all at once.