Florida’s local election supervisors on Wednesday sounded skeptical, and even distrustful, of a push by the state to remove thousands of potential non-U.S. citizens from the voting rolls just months before the critical 2012 elections. The supervisors, meeting at their annual summer conference, peppered state election officials with questions about the list of more than 2,600 people who have been identified as being in Florida legally but ineligible to vote. That list was sent to supervisors recently, but state officials have also said there may be as many as 182,000 registered voters who may not be citizens. State election officials want the state’s 67 county election offices to reach out to those on the list, determine their citizenship status and remove them from the rolls if they are not U.S. citizens. But election supervisors – including Democrats and Republicans – asked a range of questions about the level of proof that state election officials had regarding the citizenship status of voters which was culled by comparing voter registration lists to a state driver’s license database. They said they wanted more information before they purge someone from the voting rolls.
“I’m feeling really uncomfortable about this,” Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes told officials with the state’s Division of Elections. Brian Corley, the Pasco County elections supervisor, questioned the timing of the push, noting that election officials were first given a list of potential ineligible voters from the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles roughly a year ago.
Corley pointed out how two voters on the department’s list given to him wound up being born in Ohio and Massachusetts. One of the names wound up on the list of non-U.S. citizens because the driver’s license number used to check citizenship had one number wrong on it. “We want our voter rolls to be accurate, obviously no one wants someone to vote who isn’t a citizen,” Corley said. “But at the same time we are the ones fielding phone calls from voters saying ‘Why are you questioning my citizenship?”
Full Article: Fla. election chiefs skeptical of voter purge.