Florida’s flawed 2012 purge of the voter rolls was struck down by a federal appeals court Wednesday. This came only days after Secretary of State Ken Detzner delayed yet another planned purge of the voter lists. With any luck, Florida elections officials will respond by quietly giving up on the whole, flawed exercise. The rationale behind the past purge lists and the planned purge for this year was that there are a large number of ineligible noncitizens out there somehow registering and voting. Something still unproven. Just look at how the 2012 search for illegal voters proceeded here. That first purge list included 15 possible noncitizens out of 319,207 Volusia registered voters. Except that one voter identified as an noncitizen was a 76-year-old Ormond Beach woman who was born in Pennsylvania and had voted in every presidential election since 1956. Another was a soldier serving in Afghanistan.
“The list was just bogus,” Volusia County Supervisor of Elections Ann McFall concluded at the time. An appraisal widely shared by other elections supervisors.
In Flagler, the list found exactly one potential noncitizen on the voter rolls, but that person never voted. And so on all over the state.
When it was all over, a total of 85 people were removed from the rolls out of 11.4 million Florida registered voters. And really, we don’t even know for sure that they were all noncitizens, just that they didn’t all respond to letters from the election offices.
Full Article: Time to purge the voter purge lists | News-JournalOnline.com.