Feisty freshman Florida Rep. Allen West is taking the Justice Department to task for ordering his state to drop its effort to strike non-citizens from its list of eligible voters.
Florida GOP Gov. Rick Scott has acted to purge the state’s voter rolls of non-citizens and other ineligible voters, including dead people. The Justice Department sees the move as an effort to prevent minorities, who tend to support Democrats, from voting,
Politico reports.
The department has sued Florida to halt the initiative. At the same time, Florida has promised to sue the Department of Homeland Security for keeping it away from the federal database to help the cleansing operation.
West defended the initiative in an interview on C-Span Monday. “I don’t think it is disenfranchisement,” he said.
“I think that African-Americans that are citizens of [the] United States of America can get out and vote. Four years ago we saw them in numbers that had never been seen before. I think that we should be able to go in and look at our voting systems and making sure they are clean.”
Each state must be allowed to regulate its own voting system, meaning the feds should butt out of Florida and other states, West said.
“The state of Florida has been trying to get the Department of Homeland Security for over a year to work with us, to make sure we do have integrity of the voting system, because I think that’s what makes America America — our democratic process,” he said.
“And I don’t think we need to have the U.N. or anyone else coming in and looking at it. We can clean it up ourselves. I have a problem with the Department of Justice once again going after sovereign states that are trying to do the thing that is necessary to keep integrity in our process.”
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