A trio of Florida Supreme Court justices girded for battle this week following last week’s announcement by state Republicans that they will try to take the “activist” justices down.
The fight over efforts to remove Justices R. Fred Lewis, Barbara Pariente and Peggy Quince went from backwater to front burner last week with attorneys’ groups and former colleagues jumping to the jurists’ defense in the face of a recall campaign now officially blessed by the Republican Party of Florida.
The ramping up of forces in a judicial retention election – normally an obscure ballot item - highlighted an election-dominated week.
Also last week, state election officials settled with the federal government over early voting procedures while continuing the effort to keep ineligible voters from the polls, and a sitting state lawmaker announced he wouldn’t seek re-election after his name came up during a prostitution investigation.
And what would a Florida campaign be without some voter fraud? This week, the RPOF severed ties with a voter registration company after paying it $1.3 million to gather signatures, some of which may have been faked.
Gov. Rick Scott this week continued to sing the economy’s praises, touting job growth and other encouraging signs that Florida’s economy is coming back. The message continues despite less-optimistic assessments that have surfaced indicating some potholes remain on the road to recovery.
The governor’s weekly radio address boasts the addition of 28,000 new jobs.
Merit retention battle heats up
Three Florida Supreme Court judges who have rejected Republican-backed efforts on a couple of issues found themselves in the crosshairs in the normally
afterthought merit retention elections.
With some studies showing nine out of 10 Florida voters have no idea what merit retention even means, Lewis, Pariente and Quince are being targeted by conservatives and now the state Republican executive committee, which described the trio as liberals who had been involved in extensive “judicial activism.”
Since the 1970s, Supreme Court justices have had their names on the ballot every six years for voters to say whether they should stay on the court. If the justices are not retained, Scott will have the opportunity to appoint three new ones.
The justices have collectively raised more than $1 million to fight back, though judicial canons limit what they can say in their own defense.
Election challenges remain
Florida’s battle with federal officials over the state’s revised early voting scheme seems to have come to an end after a federal judge in Jacksonville this week denied a request by Democratic Congresswoman Corrine Brown and other black voters to stop the state from reducing the number of early-voting days ahead of the Nov. 6 elections.
The voters had argued that reducing the number of early-voting days from at least 12 to no more than eight, would disproportionately affect minority voters, who have been more likely to take advantage of early voting than white voters.
The state had countered that elections officials were allowed to offer more hours on each of those days, and that the changes applied equally to all voters.
In his decision, District Court Judge Timothy Corrigan of Jacksonville relied heavily on evidence that many counties would offer as many as 12 hours a day in early voting and would require some Sunday voting, a potential opening for the “souls to the polls” get-out-the-vote efforts of some black churches.
And local elections supervisors this week again began checking names of some registered voters to see if they’re eligible to cast ballots, using a list of 198 names from the state aimed at culling non-citizens from the rolls.
The Division of Elections this week sent the names to the supervisors in the counties where those voters live, after using a federal homeland security database to pinpoint those who might not be citizens.
Local elections supervisors said they are still waiting for more documentation before notifying potentially ineligible voters.