A federal judge blocked much of Florida’s year-old voter suppression law today as an unconstitutional infringement on speech and voting rights.

Last year, the Republican-held Florida legislature passed HB 1355, which imposed harsh new restrictions on third-party voter registration groups, requiring them to turn in completed registration forms 48 hours — to the minute — after completion, or face fines. Outside groups often register hundreds of people at a time and, before this law, had used a quality-control process that took days to ensure the accuracy of submitted forms. With the onerous restrictions now in place, some groups like the League of Women Voters were ultimately forced to cease registration drives in the Sunshine State.

In blocking the new law, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle wrote:

The statute and rule impose a harsh and impractical 48-hour deadline for an organization to deliver applications to a voter registration office and effectively prohibit an organization from mailing applications in. And the statute and rule impose burdensome record-keeping and reporting requirements that serve little if any purpose, thus rendering them unconstitutional even to the extent they do not violate the NVRA. [...]

The plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm if an injunction is not issued, first because the denial of a right of this magnitude under circumstances like these almost always inflicts irreparable harm, and second because when a plaintiff loses an opportunity to register a voter, the opportunity is gone forever.

Though state judges and the Department of Justice have already taken steps to prevent voter disenfranchisement, Hinkle’s decision is the first time a federal court has blocked one of the most recent round of state voter suppression laws.

Voters have already begun to experience the effects of new anti-voting laws. Minority voter registration is down significantly from the 2008 election. Among Latinos nationwide, voter registration has dropped five percent; for blacks, registration rates are down seven percent.

New York University’s Brennan Center, which studies voting rights issues, hailed the decision. “Florida’s law and others approved in the past year represent the most significant cutback in voting rights in decades,” said director Wendy Weiser. “Today’s decision will help turn the tide.”

Florida Republican Party Chairman Lenny Curry appeared on MSNBC this morning to defend his party’s decision to purge thousands of voters — many of whom are, in fact, eligible to vote — from the state’s voter rolls. But in the course of doing so, Curry admitted that the data Florida is using is flawed:

CURRY: We’re just ensuring that in Florida, which is going to be a critical swing state which will likely be close, that every individual that casts a ballot is a United States citizen. [...] There are certainly some issues with the data.

Watch it:

A 91 year-old decorated World War II veteran and a small business owner in Ft. Lauderdale are just two casualties of the faulty data. In fact, an independent investigation by the Miami Herald found that the largest groups of voters affected by the purge are “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters.” Already, more than 300 wrongly-targeted eligible voters have been identified in Miami-Dade County alone.

Florida Democrats and civil rights groups have called on Gov. Rick Scott (R) to stop purging voters after it was revealed that the Scott administration was instructing election officials to use flawed data from the state’s motor vehicle administration to crosscheck voters’ eligibility. One Supervisor of Elections told ThinkProgress that the process would certainly result in eligible voters being removed from the rolls.

MSNBC host Thomas Roberts challenged Curry on his claim that non-citizens voting in Florida’s elections are a serious problem, to which Curry offered a story of a single non-citizen who supposedly voted in a past election.

Tell Rick Scott to stop Florida’s voter purge by adding your name here.

When Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) administration distributed its controversial lists of possible non-citizen voters last month, state statute required the state’s 67 county supervisors of elections to send out letters requiring those voters to prove their eligibility to vote within 30 days — a window that will end in the next couple of weeks in many counties. But a ThinkProgress survey of several county supervisors in Florida reveals that the lists of presumed non-eligible voters is riddled with errors. In large and small jurisdictions across the state, supervisors have found that a large number of the voters on the list are indeed eligible voters.

(Click the graphic to enlarge)

Volusia County Supervisor of Elections Ann McFall told ThinkProgress that she and the state’s 66 other county elections supervisors sent a “clear message” to the Scott administration at a Tampa conference two weeks ago. “One after another, [they] got up and talked about inaccuracies [in the state’s voter purge list of alleged non-citizen voters].”

In Miami-Dade, the count of voters whose citizenship status has been challenged by the Scott administration numbered in the hundreds. With time left to respond, nearly a quarter of those sent letters in have already proven their eligibility.

Several smaller counties also confirmed to ThinkProgress that voters have proven that their inclusion on the list was in error.

In Clay County, near Jacksonville, the elections supervisor received two names from the state. One proved citizenship; the other was purged from the rolls for not responding within 30 days. Charlotte County (two out of nine) and Bradford County (two out of nine) also reported significant percentage of errors on the state’s list.

Citrus County Supervisor of Elections Susan Gill (R), who serves a Tampa-area county with a population of just about 140,000, received just three names from the state that it deemed likely non-citizens. But already two of those have produced documentation to verify their citizenship and voter eligibility. One of the two was even born in New York State. The third voter, who has yet to respond to a registered letter, has never even voted.

Gill told ThinkProgress:

Everybody thinks we vote in a computer world. When you do any sort of data matches, you need several data points to make a good match. When the state first sent these 2,600 to us, some of the matches didn’t have enough information. We’re required by law to send a letter … and unfortunately they have to prove their citizenship. Some of them weren’t terribly happy. The state needs to find a better way to do the data matches.

Before the state sends out lists challenging the eligibility of voters — putting the onus on lawfully registered citizens to re-prove their eligibility — it has an obligation to be certain that that list is valid. Clearly, it did not do so here.

The purge of fully eligible voters from the voting rolls by Scott could be enough to tip the balance in Florida and, perhaps, the presidential election. In 2000, the final (disputed) margin was just 537 votes.

Tell Rick Scott to stop his Florida voter purge by adding your name here.

While several Florida elections supervisors have expressed serious concerns about Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) controversial effort to remove voters it thinks may be non-citizens from the state’s voter rolls, one supervisor has drawn a line in the sand.

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher, a former Democratic state representative, told ThinkProgress in an interview that while the state of Florida sent her county 115 names of voters it considered “sure matches” with a list of non-citizens, her office determined the list’s documentation to be “not credible” and has not sent out letters asking for verification of citizens to any of those voters.

Bucher said:

We need to make sure we have reliable and credible information, by a preponderance of evidence. We could prove that the information was not credible before sending letters and even the Division of Elections has admitted substantial flaws. I did not feel we had credible information and told them I wouldn’t send [any letters] until they could give me a better list.

This thing is not working out so well, we know the information [on which the state relied to flag these names] is very old. They [listed the voter's] last transaction date with [the Florida Department of] Highway Safety — in many cases, [the was 2000, 2002]. By now they probably have become citizens – I questioned immediately.

Bucher says that given the documented inaccuracies around the state, the purge effort should be stopped. “We just want to have accurate data—why disturb voters and ask for extraordinary information? What if they get a letter and they’re on vacation, think it’s just mail, ignore it? We hope the state cleans it up very quickly.”

Yesterday, Florida GOP Chair Lenny Curry released a statement defending Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) plan to purge tens of thousands of voters from Florida’s voter roles. The purge is based on an error riddled list of purportedly ineligible voters which includes hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens in just one county. According to Curry, purging voters is just like a DUI checkpoint:

This past Memorial Day weekend, law enforcement put up checkpoints to ensure drunk drivers did not threaten the safety of fellow motorists. Undoubtedly, many of the drivers who were met by police were, in fact, not driving drunk. However, we accept the notion that on such a heavily traveled holiday, a few moments of inconvenience to law-abiding drivers is worth it if we can ensure safe highways.

Similarly, officials in Florida are undertaking a methodical and reasonable effort to maintain the security of Florida’s voter rolls. While some who are citizens, and others who are not deceased, may be asked to simply participate in the verification process, thousands of these records do accurately reflect non-citizens and people who have died.

But, of course, police do not throw sober drivers in jail or take away their license. Curry’s metaphor would only make sense if Florida police randomly pulled over and jailed thousands of citizens, with little evidence they had been drinking, and then required them to show proof of their soberness before letting them out of jail. Officials in Florida are carrying out the purge by sending an ominous and legalistic letter to voters targeted as non-citizens that requires them to request “an administrative hearing to present evidence” in order to dispute the State of Florida’s determination or be removed from the voter rolls.

Moreover, the Florida voter purge disproportionately affects Hispanics and Democrats. Fifty-eight percent of the list of more than 2,600 potential non-citizens are Hispanic while Hispanics make up only 13% of Florida’s population, a fact that places Florida in likely violation of federal law. The Voting Rights Act not only forbids laws that are passed specifically to target minority voters, it also strikes down state voter procedures that have a greater impact on minority voters than on others.

–Alex Brown

The massive voter purge order by Governor Rick Scott in Florida has been plagued with errors, resulting in election officials notifying hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens that they are ineligible to vote.

In response, the Scott administration has vowed to intensify its efforts to remove registered voters from the rolls.

Initially, the state created a list of over 180,000 purported “non-citizens” by comparing their list of registered voters to the state motor vehicle database. The state forwarded about 2700 names from that list to local officials to remove from the rolls. Yesterday, in the face of mounting problems with the limited effort, Scott administration officials made it clear they were just getting started:

Chris Cate, a spokesman for the state Division of Elections, defended the state’s actions. “It’s very important we make sure ineligible voters can’t cast a ballot,” he said in an email to the Herald on Tuesday.

He said the state continues to identify ineligible voters, saying the state Division of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles has agreed to update information using a federal database that the elections division couldn’t access directly.

“We won’t be sending any new names to supervisors until the information we have is updated, because we always want to make sure we are using the best information available,” Cate wrote. “I don’t have a timetable on when the next list of names will be sent to supervisors, but there will be more names.”

It’s unclear how the new procedures alluded to by Cate will solve the systemic problems with the voter purge list. There have been several individuals targeted by the list that have been citizens their entire lives. Therefore, there seems to be a major problems beyond outdated citizenship information.

Moreover, the entire process of database matching to remove voters is problematic. The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.”

The first list was also created with information accessible to the state motor vehicle administration, which the former Secretary of State Kurt Browning considered so unreliable he refused to release. Browning resigned in February.

Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) has directed his administration to purge the state’s voting rolls of thousands of registered voters prior to the November election. But his list, which purports to include only “non-citizens,” targets mostly Democrats and Hispanics and, as ThinkProgress has documented, may disenfranchise hundreds of citizens who are eligible to vote.

The story of a sitting governor of a state with a history of presidential election shenanigans knowingly purging his own, eligible constituents from the voter rolls is the definition of major news, and yet remarkably, in the first five months of the year, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today have published a total of zero articles about Scott’s actions. The New York Times did slightly better, printing one story on page 16 of the Friday, May 18th edition. The article ran under the credulous headline: “Florida Steps Up Effort Against Illegal Voters.”

Florida’s local newspapers, led by The Miami Herald, have been far more diligent in reporting the governor’s effort to disenfranchise eligible voters. While it may be easy to dismiss this as local fare, the implications of Scott’s purge could potentially swing the presidential election come November. Remember, months before anyone had ever heard of hanging chads, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (R) conducted a similar cleansing of the voter rolls in 2000, which resulted in thousands of eligible voters being knocked off the rolls in time for the infamous Gore v. Bush election.