The Florida law which shortened early voting in the state and disenfranchised an unknown number of voters, was deliberately designed as a racist tool to suppress voting among African-Americans, Hispanics and groups that historically support Democratic candidates.
Those are the explosive charges of Florida’s former Republican chairman, Jim Greer, who went public on Monday with claims blasting his own party and the state’s Republican governor for spearheading the controversial new law.
“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told the Palm Beach Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only…‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us.’”
The HB 1355 law was passed by Florida’s Republican legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Scott in November of 2011, cutting the number of early voting days from 14 to 8. The end result was the national image of mile long lines of voters, waiting up to 10 hours at a time in overbearing temperatures to cast a ballot. Some voters simple gave up and left, while others were still waiting in line at 2am on election night, even while election results were being announced. Although the state party and its governor publicly sold the law as an effort to reduce voter fraud and to save money, Greer’s conscious forced him to admit that their explanation was merely a “marketing ploy.”
Former Florida governor Charlie Crist, who left the GOP to become an Independent, was livid at the news. “People have fought and died for our right to vote, and unfortunately our legislature and this governor have decided they want to make early voting less available to Floridians rather than more available,” he said. “It’s hard for me as an American to comprehend why you don’t make democracy as easy as possible to exercise for the people of our state. It’s frankly unconscionable.”
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| Mitt Romney with Florida Gov. Rick Scott |
This revealing news of Republican trickery in Florida, combined with the Romney family’s ownership of voting machines in Ohio, is probably the real reason Mitt Romney was so dead-set convinced that he was going to win, but so incredibly shell-shocked when he actually didn’t!
