Being a resident of this state. I’m beyond flabbergasted by this man. No bid contracts, drug testing the poor, humiliating himself (and thereby the rest of us) in Europe, but this one tops it.

Governor Rick Scott [Link to Miami Herald] has submitted a list of 2,700 names of people - “potential noncitzens” - that he says are illegal voters and wishes to purge them from the Florida roles. The problem is that 514 have already been found to be lawful citizens. Most of the rest had no backup information at all, and contained duplicate IDs and the names of already removed voters, including three dead people. Also, out of all those people, only 40 have been identified as noncitizens and four are felons - the only two groups who legally are prohibited from voting.

Thank goodness Florida election supervisors are having none of it and have stopped the procedure.

Miami-Dade Election Supervisor Penelope Townsley says, “‘I find the state’s Non-Citizens Match list to be unreliable and insufficient, on its own.’

‘We’re just not going to do this,’ said Leon County’s elections supervisor, Ion Sancho, one of the most outspoken of his peers. ‘I’ve talked to many of the other supervisors and they agree. The list is bad. And this is illegal.’

Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner says he wants Homeland Security (federal) to provide him with names from the immigration database, but the feds won’t do it. So Detzner just decided to submit a list anyway.

Part of the issue is that the immigration database is not immediately updated when someone becomes a citizen even if they hold proper documentation. Meanwhile, they usually register to vote as soon as they become citizens, but can still appear as “noncitizens” on the rolls.

I’m not against purging the rolls of people who are not eligible to vote, but this is outright careless, at best and illegal, at worst. Further, there is concern among Democratic, liberal and minority-rights groups that 87 percent of those on the “potential noncitizens” list are minorities. Go figure.

This is one thing that must be done right in order to preserve our democracy. Not that our crook governor has any desire to preserve democracy.

Two other things, Dentzer has now inspired a noncitizen voter-purge movement in North Carolina and met with their Secretary of State there last Friday. I don’t know what became of that.

And while it’s frenzied up the Tea Party here in Florida,

‘We’re going to keep the pressure on, all over the state,’ said Billie Tucker, co-founder of the First Coast Tea Party in Jacksonville. ‘We want noncitizen voters prosecuted. We don’t know how many are out there.’

Scott’s ratings have severely tanked to a dismal 31%. At least there’s one silver lining on this cloud of doom and depression.

Several polls have shown now that Rick Scott would lose in 2014 if Charlie Crist became a Democrat and ran against him but our newest survey finds that Democrats might not need that high of a profile candidate to knock off Scott, at least if he remains this unpopular. 5% of voters in the state have a positive opinion of State Senator Nan Rich. Only 14% have even heard of her. And despite that she still leads Scott by 12 points in a hypothetical match up, 47-35.

Obviously that finding has a lot more to do with Scott than it does with Rich. His approval rating has sunk back down to 31%, with 56% of voters disapproving of him. One thing that hasn’t done his popularity any favors lately is his push to eliminate some people from the voter rolls. Only 34% of voters approve of that effort to 50% who disagree with it.