Fox Nation’s Lopsided Reporting On Florida Voter Purge

Threats of litigation were flying today between federal agencies and the state of Florida over Florida’s efforts to disenfranchise voters who disagree with the state’s Republican leadership. Governor Rick Scott’s plans to throw people off the voter rolls has been revealed to be a blatant attempt to illegally prevent minorities, senior citizens, and the poor from voting, constituencies that just happen to vote Democratic.

The Justice Department advised the Governor and the Secretary of State (in a detailed letter) that the methods they proposed to use to remove allegedly ineligible names from the voter registration records were both flawed and unlawful. The response from Scott was to announce that he would be suing the feds and that he intended to continue his voter purge.

Fox Nation, however, did not carry a report of this announcement for many hours after it had been made. It was not until a subsequent announcement from the Justice Department that they were planning legal action against the state that the Fox Nationalists finally posted an article on the matter. And, of course, the lede was that the federal government was suing Florida.

Fox Nation on Florida Lawsuit

The intention by Fox was to portray the government as the aggressors in this litigation. That fits in nicely with their narrative of the Obama government being a dictatorial regime that is abusing its power over the sovereign states. And that’s why they didn’t bother to report that it was the state that initiated the legal action.

That’s not all that Fox failed to report. The substance of the dispute between Florida and the DOJ concerns the state’s unlawful purging of legitimate voters. The Tampa Bay Times conducted a review of the state’s proposed list of ineligible voters and found a total of forty non-citizens. Out of those, they identified at most six who “might” have voted. Conversely, they found more than 500 people who were determined to be actual citizens entitled to register and vote. Yet Scott continues to assert a justification for stripping the right to vote from 500 (mostly Democratic) citizens in order to block a half dozen ineligible voters.

The Justice Department is not the only party suing Florida. The ACLU has also filed a suit over the same issues. If you want to help you can sign this petition from MoveOn.org calling on AG Eric Holder to “to block Gov. Scott from illegitimately kicking Floridians off the voter roll.”

On a side note, I wasted a little time perusing the comments attached to the Fox Nation article. In the process I observed some pretty revolting language and overt racism. Here is a representative example of the sort of people who populate the Fox community:

Fox Nation Racism

Judging from the context of the reply, my guess is that the first comment was just a well-reasoned defense of Holder and Obama. The FoxPods, not capable of tolerating that, pounced on it by clicking the “Flag” button to get the comment removed, but not before one disgusting reply was posted. Later, the entire comments section was closed and removed. There were about 300 comments when I was there, but now they are all gone. That tells you something about both the Fox community and the managers of the site.

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3 thoughts on “Fox Nation’s Lopsided Reporting On Florida Voter Purge

  1. I can’t help but wonder whether obamasucksdick might be a descendent of Pappy Finn.

  2. At least the justice dept is trying to stop this nonsense but I fear they have a few other swing states to look at as well. The govenor of Florida is claiming there are 182,000 illegal immigrants registered to vote in that state. That number is, I suspect, complete and utter nonsense. Can they get a judge to file an injunction to stop this? And if they still don’t stop people need to be fined and prosecuted for not complying with the law. If the feds can’t enforce voting rights then we are back to pre-’64-’65. This is an outrage and an affront to all citizens of the U.S. if they can get away with this in Florida then they can do it anywhere. It must be stopped!!!

    • As of today, all 67 county Supervisors of Elections have said that they will not implement Scott’s purge – including the GOP supervisors. They are independent administrators and do not report to the governor.

      But that’s not the end of the story. You are right that the DOJ needs to enforce the law in Florida and across the country.

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