Former Florida GOP chair slams party: Voter ID a 'marketing tool' to suppress minority votes

theGRIO REPORT - The former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida is currently awaiting trial for allegedly paying himself to raise money for the party...

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“Well both the governor and I said we didn’t like it, so it didn’t happen,” Greer said. “They asked me was the governor going to veto this bill and I said he very well might.”

He said his and Crist’s relationship with the party never recovered, particularly after Crist also opposed an attempt by legislators, including the Florida House Speaker, Dean Cannon, to use taxpayer money and poison pill legislation to kill a popular amendment that turned redistricting over to a non-partisan commission.

“It’s just another example of this nuthouse where we are going to do whatever we want, when we want,” Greer said of his party. “Now with the voter rolls, they tried to expunge two to three thousand people, but the list turned out to be inaccurate,” said Greer, referring to an attempt by the Florida secretary of state to “scrub” the voter rolls of allegedly ineligible voters, which resulted in the state being given access to federal immigrations data, after several court challenges.

‘No message’ for Hispanics

As critical as Greer is about his party’s tactics with respect to black voters, he also said the party has “no message” for Hispanics.

“The party is so torn about the immigration issue, that they don’t have an answer for [immigration] that will be broadly accepted by the Hispanic community,” Greer said. “So until they get that answer, they’re going to give lip service to the Hispanic community.”

Greer said his Hispanic outreach committee met the same fate as his black outreach efforts after he was no longer chair. “There’s so much turmoil within the party,” he said. “The tea party wants to round them all up and put them on a bus regardless of how they came here and what ties they or their children have,” he adds, referring to Hispanic Americans and the GOP. “They don’t know what to tell them.”

But Greer alleges that the party does have a message for Cuban-American community leaders in the stronghold of Miami, where Republicans routinely win majorities of Hispanic votes.

“When I was chairman,” he said, party leaders “would periodically come to me and ask me to authorize cash disbursements, and one of the reasons they did that was because particularly down in Miami, I was informed that there were Hispanic leaders that needed to get cash payments to either support the party or oppose certain candidates, or get people to the polls. That is so weird because as I think about it now, onetime I did a cash disbursement to one of our Hispanic leaders of $10,000.”

“It was a brown bag thing,” said Greer. “I was told they would go on Hispanic radio and talk up the Republican candidate.”

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