A coalition of tea party groups is leading an investigation into possible voter fraud in Florida -- and telling the federal government to back off.
"From what we can see, the feds have stonewalled the state by not sharing information about noncitizens in our state," said Billie Tucker, head of the First Coast Tea Party in Jacksonville.
Tea partiers say they will actively resist U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's recent demand that Florida stop purging noncitizens from the voter lists.
"We've had a lot of people researching this for the last three years. If feds won't give us the information, we'll get it ourselves," Tucker vowed.
Working with Texas-based True the Vote, the tea party coalition is ramping up an investigation similar to a Fort Myers TV station's report that compared jury lists with voter lists. That comparison found that several noncitizens disqualified from jury duty turned up on the local voter rolls.
I vote every year, Hinako Dennett told NBC2.The Cape Coral resident is not a U.S, citizen, yet shes registered to vote.
Holder's Justice Department has warned Florida against any "purging" of the voter rolls until the state submits a plan and receives federal approval 90 days before implementation.
"The state did just that and the DoJ stonewalled," complained a tea party activist who declined to be identified.
"Much like illegal immigration, the law is kept on the books, as a nod to public opinion, but states will be sued if they actually enforce the law."
Tucker says the tea party coalition, whose members she numbers in the "hundreds," will proceed with their probe, and that local supervisors of elections need to cooperate.
"There are good supervisors of elections and not-so-great ones," Tucker told Sunshine State News. "The ones who aren't cooperative will not win at the next election.
"They will be under our magnifying glass," asserted Tucker, who said the coalition is zeroing in on "more than a dozen" counties with high concentrations of noncitizens. She declined to identify the counties.
Liberal and libertarian groups see the problem differently. They point to federal courts that have blocked some of Florida's attempts at tightening voter-registration drives.
"The real fraud is in the counts. We need to go to paper ballots and public counts," says Alexander Snitker, the Libertarian Party's 2010 candidate for U.S. Senate.
Vicki Davis, president of the state Supervisors of Elections Association, said her group was not taking a formal position on the tea party initiative.
Davis, who is the supervisor of elections in Martin County, noted that the tea party investigators face a tough job.
"Jury lists are different throughout the state. Martin is all on paper. Clerks said they would have to manually go back and look when we asked because there is nothing in the database to flag noncitizens," Davis related.
But Davis shared the concern over the integrity of the voter rolls.
"The Department of State has been requesting access for a year to the federal SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) file," she noted. That request has gone nowhere.
The tea party group wants to make it clear it is not engaging in what Democrats and other left-wing groups broadly brand "voter suppression."
"We want everyone to vote who can vote legally," Tucker explained. "We just do not want to be caught in political maneuvering -- and used as pawns for some political purpose.
"If we don't have true and fair elections, we're lost as a country."
Contact Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 801-5341.
