It’s hardly a secret that Florida, home to 29 up-for-grabs electoral votes, will be one of the key 2012 battlegrounds. It’s the nation’s largest swing state, and whoever wins Florida will have an inside track to winning the White House.
Republicans in the Sunshine State, however, aren’t taking any chances, and are already taking steps to tilt the playing field.
Ari Berman has already documented many of the new voting restrictions approved by GOP policymakers over the last couple of years, including cracking down on voter-registration drives and limiting the number of days available for early voting.
But Florida Republicans, led by Gov. Rick Scott (R), aren’t quite done yet. In the newest push, the state, just six months before the election, is trying to purge non-citizens from the voting rolls, but in the process, has cast far too wide a net.
The state was found to be using a flawed process to pinpoint noncitizens on the voter rolls by relying on an outdated driver’s license database. Some of the people on an initial list of 2,700 possible noncitizens sent to county election supervisors were either naturalized citizens or were born in the United States. […]
The push to crack down on the way Floridians vote, and how they register to vote, is viewed by some as an effort to single out Democratic voters, many of them black and Hispanic. Florida has been accused in past elections of unfairly trying to remove from the rolls former felons who are eligible to vote.
The new scrub of registered voters is no different, said Howard Simon, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “It’s a purging process that is based on what the state already acknowledges to be inaccurate information,” Mr. Simon said. “It really raises questions as to whether or not this is yet another partisan effort to scrub the voting rolls. We know it’s inaccurate because people from as far away as Pensacola to Miami have come forward to say, ‘I am a U.S. citizen. I am eligible to vote.’ “
That’s not at all an exaggeration.









