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State officials in 2012 claimed to have a list of 182,000 voters who were ineligible to vote because of their citizenship status, yet still appeared on voter rolls. After further investigation, the list dwindled to a mere 198 across Florida. At the time, the state compared lists from the Department of Motor Vehicles that named licensed drivers who weren’t U.S. citizens to lists of people registered to vote. Florida, like many states, permits illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.

Voter purges are a common practice, with the Brennan Center for Justice reporting that 39 states and the District of Columbia dropped over 13 million people from voter rolls between 2004 and 2006 in efforts to ensure the accuracy of voting lists. Voters can be dropped for a number of reasons including dying, moving or appearing twice on the list.

The action has been the target of a backlash in Florida because of the impact the 2012 purge attempt had on Hispanics and Democrats, and because of a previous attempt in 2000.

Before the 2000 presidential election, over 1,000 voters were wrongfully dropped from voting rolls as a result of an effort to clear registered-voter lists of convicted felons. On Election Day, many of the dropped voters showed up to vote but were turned away from the polls.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, in partnership with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Department of Justice filed separate lawsuits against the state, saying the purge violated the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act, respectively. However, after the Supreme Court decision that invalidated a key portion of the Voting Rights Act, the district court in Tampa dismissed the ACLU lawsuit, freeing the state to further pursue the effort to clear voter rolls of noncitizen voters.

Scott originally began his voter-purge effort on the basis that there were throngs of noncitizens participating in elections, rationale that appeared to be disproved by the small number of noncitizens who ended up on the final list of registered voters. “We know from just a small sample that an alarming number of noncitizens are on the voter rolls, and many of them have illegally voted in past elections,” Scott said in a June 2012 statement.

“We have always taken the position that benefit of the doubt goes to the voter, not to the state,” Ron Labasky, general counsel for the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, tells TIME. “No voters are removed unless we’re very comfortable with their eligibility status.”

This time around, the state will be using the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ citizenship database, SAVE, to determine the status of voters.

According to the Stanford Law Review, however, SAVE still runs the risk of disenfranchising certain groups, including those who appear in DMV records as noncitizens and citizens who happen to have the same name as illegal immigrants.

“Anybody whose status is in question is potentially losing a legal right guaranteed under the Constitution,” Labasky says. “ More at http://swampland.time.com/2013/08/09/why-the-next-florida-voter-purge-
will-be-different-than-the-last/#ixzz2bUR5OHwh

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