For Scott, who was elected in 2010 with a strong stance against illegal immigration, it's that simple: There's evidence that noncitizens have cast ballots in the past, and that has to stop. (Unlike the supposed problem of voter fraud, of which there few documented instances, noncitizens do vote in many elections. Often, it's an innocent mistake -- a legal immigrant who signed up to vote at the DMV, not realizing she wasn't eligible, for example.)

After months of controversy and lawsuits, Scott recently secured the cooperation of the federal government with his voter purge efforts, an agreement he hailed as a significant victory. His example is now being emulated by Republican election officials in numerous other states, including Colorado, Ohio, and Iowa -- a trend Democrats and their allies fear is a new front in the highly politicized battle over voting rights. Scott hailed it as progress: "This is great for our state and great for other states," he said. "The right to vote is a sacred right."

The purge effort has Democrats and the Obama campaign on high alert, convinced it is a thinly veiled ploy to keep their voters from the polls. "[Scott's] original plan would have disenfranchised tens of thousands of eligible voters. It's clear it was really a political ploy from the very beginning," said Rep. Ted Deutch, a Boca Raton Democrat who has led the charge against the purge. "When you look at the states throughout the country that are trying to make it more difficult to register and cast a vote, it's obvious that there is a nationwide effort underway to suppress the vote."

For all Scott's triumphalism and Democrats' concern, however, it's far from clear whether his purge will even go forward in time for the November election; and if it does, its scope is likely to be severely limited. Even as the federal government has agreed to cooperate with Florida's purge effort, the state hasn't yet determined how it will go forward, and time is running out. Meanwhile, more potential obstacles -- in the form of outstanding legal challenges, as well as the local officials who may simply refuse to take voters off the rolls -- stand in the way of the effort.

The result may well be a stalemate in which the whole voter purge, despite having caused such an uproar, comes to naught or nearly so. So while the polls show another close election in Florida, those anticipating another debacle on the scale of the 2000 recount are likely to be disappointed.

A quick recap of the purge story thus far: The Florida secretary of state, who oversees elections and is appointed by the governor, initially drafted a list of some 180,000 potential illegal voters based on the state driver's license database. Some legal immigrants can get driver's licenses in the state, including those on student or work visas and those in the process of naturalization; the state sought to match those names with the names of voters.