“I accept responsibility for the effort,” Scott’s secretary of state, Ken Detzner, told the Herald/Times. “It could have been better. It should have been better.”
Detzner, who serves as Scott’s top elections official, is repeating the mea culpa during a five-day road tour that concludes this week in Orlando, Sarasota and Fort Lauderdale. The apology is part of a sales pitch to the public and supervisors of elections that a second attempt to remove noncitizens from voter rolls, “Project Integrity”, will be better.
“We learned from the mistakes we made,” Detzner said. “We won’t make the same mistakes.”
But forgiveness is hardly automatic. While encouraged that the admission was made, some said they are hesitant to trust state officials.