Gearing up for his 2014 reelection campaign, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is launching a new purge of Florida’s voting rolls in an attempt to sift out any potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote in the state.
A similar effort last year was filled with errors, found few ineligible voters and prompted lawsuits by advocacy groups that argued the purge disproportionately targeted minority groups, according to the Miami Herald. Florida’s list of registered voters suspected of not being U.S. citizens shrank from 182,000 to 2,600 to 198 before the 2012 election.
“It was sloppy, it was slapdash and it was inaccurate,” Polk County Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards told the Herald. “They were sending us names of people to remove because they were born in Puerto Rico. It was disgusting.”
Secretary of State Ken Detzner, Florida’s top election official, is creating a new list of suspected noncitizen voters by cross-checking state voter data with a the Department of Homeland Security’s federal database, the Miami Herald reported.
