Over the past week it's been reported that the state is undertaking a purge of the voting rolls, which no doubt caused Florida Democrats to ask: Again?
For those of you with short memories, there was that little snafu back in the extremely loud and incredibly close election of 2000 — the one in which state election officials and a private contractor called ChoicePoint did an ill-advised scrubbing of the rolls that wrongly disenfranchised thousands of voters.
In a directive led by Rick Scott, Florida election officials have been trying this year to clear the voting rolls of non-citizens. Last week officials said they would use information from a federal database to check a list of 182,000 voters who they suspect are not citizens.
Democrats have objected, and on Thursday a host of civil and voting rights groups — Project Vote, Fair Elections Legal Network, the Hillsborough Hispanic Coalition — sent a letter to Secretary of State Ken Dentzler alerting him that Florida’s plan to identify and remove alleged non-citizens from the voter rolls violates federal law and must cease immediately.
This article appears in May 24-30, 2012.