Russian hackers could learn from state’s hacks

Who needs the damn Russians anyway? State politicians have done a bangup job of subverting Florida elections without help from foreign saboteurs. We should worry more about political hacks than Putin’s hackers.

Over the last week or so, Gov. Rick Scott and his campaign operatives have questioned U.S. Senator Bill Nelson’s contention that Russian computer hackers have “penetrated” some county voter registration databases. Scott, the senator’s likely challenger in the November election, intimated that Nelson either invented the story or else had blurted out classified information.

Besides, the theoretical threat posed by Russian meddlers hardly compares to the actual assaults on Florida’s democracy contrived by the state’s own Republican leadership.

For the past seven years, they’ve waged a series of nefarious campaigns to sabotage student and minority participation in elections, including a moronic attempt in 2012 — using an outdated, wildly inaccurate data base — to remove 180,000 voters from the campaign rolls. Eventually, the state sent county voting supervisors a list of 2,600 suspect voters, 58 percent of whom just happened to have Hispanic surnames. (A Miami Herald analysis found that 87 percent belonged to racial minorities).

Except county supervisors then discovered that hundreds of the names on the purge list were legitimate citizen voters. (A month later, the U.S. Justice Department put a stop to the bungled operation.)

The Republican-controlled Legislature also pushed through harsh new restrictions on voter registration groups like the League of Women Voters. U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle seemed stunned by the brazen attempt “to discourage voter-registration drives and thus also to make it harder for new voters to register.” Judge Hinkle asked the state’s lawyer in the case, “You don’t think there’s any constitutional right involved in going out and asking people to register to vote? Not even a smidgen?”

With an eye on the 2012 election and with President Obama on the ballot, Scott and the his legislative allies cut early voting days from 14 to just eight days and eliminated early voting on the Sunday before Election Day, undermining the “Souls to the Polls” campaign aimed at black churchgoers.

Four years earlier, Crist had signed an executive order extending early voting hours after reports of long lines and long waits. In 2012, Gov. Rick Scott refused to do the same for even longer lines and longer waits.

Former Republican State Chairman Jim Greer (albeit after he was accused of misappropriating party funds) told the Palm Beach Post that the state party had been hellbent on cutting back early voting because “the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates.” Greer said the party was particularly interested in tamping down the black vote, especially “souls to the polls.”

(In 2013, with President Obama’s re-election out of the way, yet another election law returned the early voting period to 14 days.)

In his seven years in office, Gov. Scott has restored voting rights for less than 3,000 convicted felons — compared to 155,000 during Gov. Charlie Crist’s single term. (Florida is one of only four states that permanently disenfranchise citizens with felony convictions, unless the governor intervenes.)

In March, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker ruled that Florida’s restoration process was “fatally flawed” and ordered the state to come up with something less abstruse. Voters can fix the problem themselves in November by approving Amendment Four, which would automatically restore felon voting rights after completion of prison sentences (except for convicted murders and sex offenders).

In 2014, Ken Detzner, a beer lobbyist before Scott anointed him secretary of state, targeted another liberal-leaning demographic. He barred the use of the University of Florida student union and, by extension, any campus building at any state college or university, as an early voting site. The beer meister offered the bizarre pretext that a state college student union was not a “government building.”

“Throwing up roadblocks in front of younger voters does not remotely serve the public interest,” Judge Walker wrote last month, deciding a lawsuit challenging the student union ban. “Abridging voter rights never does.”

Scott had dismissed the lawsuit as “frivolous.”

And who can forget the governor’s callous refusal to extend voter registration for the 2016 general election, no matter that Hurricane Matthew had just whacked Florida and forced many residents to flee their home counties.

Judge Walker intervened. He ordered Florida to add another six days before shutting off registration. “These voters have already had their lives (and, quite possibly, their homes) turned upside down by Hurricane Matthew,” the judge wrote. “They deserve a break, especially one that is mandated by the United States Constitution.”

He wrote, “This case is about the right of aspiring eligible voters to register and to have their votes counted. Nothing could be more fundamental to our democracy.”

He dismissed the state’s refusal to extend the deadline as “poppycock.”

With so much politically motivated poppycock already bedeviling Florida elections, what’s a Russian hacker to do?