Florida Steps Up Effort Against Illegal Voters

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/us/florida-attempts-to-scrub-illegal-voters.html?_r=1&hpw

In an attempt to clear the voter rolls of noncitizens, a move that had set off criticism and a threatened lawsuit, Florida election officials decided on Thursday to use information from a federal database to check a list of 182,000 voters who they suspect are not citizens, officials said.

Since last year, the Florida Division of Elections had sought access to the immigration database, which is maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, but the department said there were legal and technical difficulties in sharing the information.

On Thursday, the elections division asked the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, which oversees driver’s licenses and originally compiled the list of 182,000 names, to use its access to the federal database to update its records and cross-check the names.

The state was found to be using a flawed process to pinpoint noncitizens on the voter rolls by relying on an outdated driver’s license database.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.

Election supervisors were asked to send letters to these voters, requiring them to provide proof of citizenship within 30 days, or their names would be dropped from the registration roll. In recent days, some of the supervisors had expressed concern over the validity of the state’s search.