Rick Scott's Plan to Purge Florida Voter Lists Moves Forward

 Score one for Gov. Rick Scott, who is moving ahead with plans to ferret out "noncitizens" on Florida's voter rolls. The tea party stalwart won a yearlong battle with the Obama administration last weekend when the Department of Homeland Security agreed to let the state check its voter registrations against a federal database of resident aliens in the United States. Along with ongoing efforts to crack down on voters without IDs and keep convicts away from the polls, it's a thinly disguised voter suppression tactic that could tip the electoral scales in the crucial battleground state. Scott's communications director, Brian Burgess, bragged on Saturday that "all of Florida wins!" because of this development.

 

It's not clear just how helpful the DHS database—known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE—will be to Florida Republicans. SAVE does not contain a comprehensive list of the estimated 11.5 million people who are in the United States without authorization; rather, it tracks resident aliens who have visas to stay in the US. Here's how Scott's plan is supposed to work: