Rick Scott caricature by donkeyhotey

Last year, when Gov. Rick Scott decided to purge alleged noncitizens from Florida's voter rolls, he generated a storm of opposition, including a number of lawsuits from advocacy groups. Initially, the hunt for illegally registered non-citizens turned up 182,000 names. That was soon cut to 2,600. By election day it had shrunk to 198. Now, with his re-election campaign in the offing, he's planning a new purge

The U.S. Supreme Court's Shelby County v. Holder ruling that struck down a key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act nullified a lawsuit that had been brought to stop new searches for noncitizens. The day the court announced its ruling, Scott renewed his call for a purge.

The procedure is expected to start within 60 days. If the new procedure is anything like the old one that required people to prove their citizenship, it will fall most heavily on people of Haitian and Latino origin. Of the previous procedure:



"It was sloppy, it was slapdash and it was inaccurate," said Polk County Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards. "They were sending us names of people to remove because they were born in Puerto Rico. It was disgusting." [...] Maria Rodriguez, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, which opposed previous removal efforts, said the state's motive is to remove poor and minority voters who are less likely to vote Republican. "For every voter they purge, we will nationalize and register many, many more," she said.

Obviously, noncitizens should not be voting. But eliminating people unlikely to vote for Republicans, as we have seen in state after state, has been the objective of various suppression efforts by GOP-dominated state governments. While pruning voter rolls of people who are deceased or have moved to another state or aren't legally entitled to vote is the publicly stated objective, purges like the one Scott imposed provide "lots of opportunities for eligible voters to get improperly removed because they frequently happen in a rushed, haphazard manner behind closed doors," said Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school.

However, Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, says he expects that the state's county election supervisors are going to demand that the state provide better documentation than last time around. "If it will be a fairer process this time, it will be because the County Supervisors of Elections got burned last time and are more skeptical now," he said.

If and maybe. Experience from last time around would tend to suggest that a reasonable pruning of the rolls is not the governor's intent any more than were efforts to cut back early voting hours.

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