I’ve finally had time to crunch some numbers…
Between April 11 and June 7, 107 residents in 15 of the state’s 67 counties were removed from the state’s voter rolls on account of being “potential noncitizens.” That’s roughly 0.00096% of the 11.2 million people currently registered to vote in the Sunshine State.
(Some perspective on the numbers: In the 2008 General Election, some 1,774 voters in Miami-Dade County alone mailed absentee ballots to the Supervisor of Elections, but they were rejected by the county canvassing board. Another 833 voters, out of the thousands of voters in Miami-Dade County who had to cast provisional ballots in the 2008 presidential election, never had their votes counted.)
But back to the ongoing voter purge in Florida…
According to data I received through a recent public records request from Chris Cate, the spokesman for Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner, of the 107 registered voters in Florida who were removed from the voting rolls by the Florida Division of Elections, more than a third were purged on May 4, 2012.
Here’s a Table with the date and the number of registered voters who were removed by the Florida SOS.
| DATE REMOVED | Freq. |
| 4/11/2012 | 1 |
| 4/17/2012 | 1 |
| 4/18/2012 | 1 |
| 4/19/2012 | 1 |
| 4/24/2012 | 1 |
| 4/25/2012 | 1 |
| 4/30/2012 | 1 |
| 5/2/2012 | 1 |
| 5/3/2012 | 1 |
| 5/4/2012 | 40 |
| 5/7/2012 | 1 |
| 5/8/2012 | 4 |
| 5/9/2012 | 1 |
| 5/11/2012 | 5 |
| 5/12/2012 | 2 |
| 5/13/2012 | 4 |
| 5/15/2012 | 7 |
| 5/16/2012 | 1 |
| 5/17/2012 | 4 |
| 5/21/2012 | 2 |
| 5/23/2012 | 2 |
| 5/29/2012 | 4 |
| 5/30/2012 | 2 |
| 5/31/2012 | 4 |
| 6/1/2012 | 1 |
| 6/4/2012 | 6 |
| 6/5/2012 | 1 |
| 6/7/2012 | 4 |
| 6/11/2012 | 1 |
| 6/12/2012 | 1 |
| 6/13/2012 | 1 |
| TOTAL | 107 |
And as I’ve mentioned before, it is particularly striking that little old Lee County (yep, you guessed it — it was named for Confederate General Robert E. Lee) accounted for more than 41% (44/107) of the suspected noncitizens who were purged from the voter rolls. As Miami Herald journalist Marc Caputo reported, Lee County (along with Collier County) continued “with the program of purging potential noncitizens if they fail to respond to the counties’ requests to proof citizenship” long after the other counties halted the purge because the Florida Secretary of State’s pared-down list of 2,625 “potential noncitizens” was flawed and widely discredited.
Indeed, of the 44 registered voters in Lee County that the state removed from the voter file, only two were on the list of 13 potential noncitizens that the Secretary of State sent to Lee County elections officials.
The astounding inaccuracy of the state’s list of 2,625 “potential noncitizens” was quite consistent across the other counties.
Only 41 registered voters residing in 13 counties–this is out of the 2,625 names flagged by the Florida SOS as “potential noncitizens”–were removed from the rolls.
In other words, 98.4% of the 2,625 people identified by the Florida SOS as “potential noncitizens” remain on the rolls because the Supervisors of Elections found insufficient evidence that they were ineligible to be registered voters.
The other 66 individuals who were purged from the state’s rolls were identified by eight county SOEs (Collier, Miami-Dade, Indian River, Lee, Martin, Okaloosa, Palm Beach, and Pinellas), independent of the Florida SOS’s blemished list of “potential noncitizens.”
Some list.
ElectionSmith 