Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz

When Secretary of State Matt Schultz attempted to purge voters from the rolls in advance of the November 2012 election, a county judge temporarily blocked the move, finding that the rules issued by Schultz created fear and uncertainty and could deter legitimate voters. But that risk of voter suppression hasn’t stopped Schultz from proposing a new slightly tweaked rule to remove registered voters in the name of alleged voter fraud.

The rule would allow Schultz’s office to challenge the legitimacy of registered voters who are listed as noncitizens in the Department of Transportation database. Citing a DOT list of some 3,000 registered voters labeled noncitizens, Schultz said, “I have to do something. I can’t just sit back and do nothing when we know people are taking advantage of the system.”

But Schultz’s testimony just last month before the Senate Judiciary Committee shows that he doesn’t know people are taking advantage of the system. When probed by Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) for evidence of voter fraud, Schultz cited just six arrests — not convictions – out of 1.6 million votes cast. And this was after a special agent was designated to specifically target voter fraud.

As for the list of 3,000 people, that claim was easily dismissed by the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund’s Nina Perales during the same hearing:

Secretary Schultz … said he had identified 3,500 noncitizens using the driver’s license rolls. He did not. He identified 3,500 people who were noncitizens at the time that they obtained their driver’s licenses. And we know that since that time and before they registered to vote, the overwhelming majority and perhaps all of them have become naturalized citizens. So at this point, anyone who undertakes to accuse people of non-citizenship based on driver’s licenses should be on notice that this is not correct and should not be done. It’s fundamentally unfair.

Attempts to prove voter fraud nationwide have fallen similarly short, with less than 20 instances of fraud charges offered in most states. Florida GOP officials have even publicly admitted voter suppression was the goal of that state’s aggressive and inaccurate purge.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are also arguing that Schultz cannot implement a purge without going through the state legislature. The ruling that blocked Schultz’s last attempt said that, at the very least, Schultz should have gone through the proper rulemaking procedure that allows for public input instead of going forward on his own. Schultz is now going through that procedure, but the court could still hold this process insufficient.

Despite long lines, voter suppression laws and Republican efforts to discourage voting, President Obama won reelection last night. Many of these roadblocks to voting did not happen by accident. Meet five of the Republican state elections officials who spent this election cycle thwarting the franchise:

Jon Husted

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted is the Katherine Harris of 2012. Few, if any officials in the country did more to skew a state’s vote to increase Mitt Romney’s chances of winning this election. Husted advocated firmly and repeatedly to cut early voting in Ohio, potentially disenfranchising thousands of voters who lack the job flexibility to vote on election day. He openly defied a court order requiring early voting hours to be restored, although he eventually backed down after a federal ordered him to attend a court hearing regarding this refusal to comply with the law. And he retaliated against his opponents by firing them. To top it off, Husted issued a last-minute directive that directly conflicts with Ohio law which could lead to thousands of provisional ballots being trashed.

Ken Detzner

Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner is Tea Party Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) hand-picked chief elections official, so he played a leadership role in Scott’s discredited plan to purge thousands of Florida voters from the state’s voter rolls. According to the Tampa Bay Times, “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters [were] the most likely to be targeted” by this purge. About 58 percent of the voters targeted by the purge are Hispanic, a demographic that overwhelmingly favored President Obama. The list of supposed non-citizens proved unreliable, however, and the purge was eventually shut down after the state’s local elections supervisors refused to move forward with it. Nevertheless, Detzner vowed to restart the purge at one point saying it was his “moral duty” to purge people from the voter rolls. To date, Florida’s purge caught just one non-citizen voter.

Scott Gessler

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler is currently under investigation for allegedly misusing taxpayer dollars to travel to a Republican National Lawyers Association event. Even if these allegations prove false, however, Gessler has still distinguished himself through his efforts to restrict the franchise. As a candidate for his current job, Gessler campaigned on a promise to fight the wildly exaggerated problem of election fraud. As Colorado’s chief elections official, Gessler spearheaded a voter purge targeting thousands of alleged non-citizens on his state’s voter rolls. He was eventually forced to largely abandon this purge, however, after his efforts revealed that non-citizen voting is a virtually non-existent problem.

Carol Aichele

As Pennsylvania’s Secretary of the Commonwealth, Carol Aichele played a key role in defending that state’s voter ID law — despite her admission during court testimony that she does not “know what the law says.” After state officials released data indicating that 9 percent of the state’s voters lacked the ID required by the law, Aichele claimed that the real number was actually closer to 1 percent. When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court expressed skepticism that the voter suppression law would not disenfranchise voters, Aichele announced minor tweeks to the requirements to obtain an ID in Pennsylvania. The judiciary deemed this dodge insufficient, and largely suspended the law. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania continued to run misleading ads suggesting that voters must show ID in order to vote.

Matt Schultz

Like Colorado and Florida, Iowa attempted its own voter purge targeting the illusionary problem of non-citizen voting, with Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz spearheading this purge. An Iowa court temporarily blocked this purge, however, warning that it “created confusion and mistrust in the voter registration process [and] have created fear that new citizens will lose their right to vote and/or be charged with a felony and [have] caused some qualified voters to feel deterred from even registering to vote.”

Bonus: Charlie White

Indiana’s Republican former Secretary of State Charlie White was removed from office last February after he was convicted of six felony counts of perjury, theft and election fraud.

A federal appeals court said Tuesday it will not rule before Election Day on a challenge to Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s aggressive program to purge almost 200 voters from the rolls. That list of 198 voters was pared down from 180,000 individuals, and then to a list of 2,600 that was still riddled with errors. There remains evidence that even this smaller list is not accurate.

In rejecting the request for an expedited hearing, Eleventh Circuit Judge Rosemary Barkett reasoned that the Florida Secretary of State had guaranteed “there is no chance that a citizen will be erroneously removed before election day.” But this is not because Secretary Ken Dutzner agreed to halt the purge until after the election. Instead, he made a procedural argument, based on several unsubstantiated assertions, that it would be impossible for the state to remove a citizen before the election, given the law’s required 30 days’ notice to contest a purge. In their reply motion, plaintiffs poke several gaping holes in this reasoning, including pointing out that notices could and likely have already been sent out with far less than 30 days left before the election, and that those who respond in less than 30 days with a written objection may be purged immediately.

Judge Barkett did not wade into the Secretary’s reasoning in her order, instead relying upon the “representation that there is no chance that a citizen will be removed from the voter rolls.” Given this guarantee, it may turn out that the plaintiffs have a claim of fraud upon the court, should it become evident that the state purged even a single citizen.

Earlier this year, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) began a massive voter purge that initially targeted as many as 180,000 individuals to be removed from the state’s voter rolls. It quickly emerged, however, that Scott’s lists were deeply flawed — in one case, a 91 year-old decorated World War II veteran received a purge letter falsely informing him that “you are not a U.S. Citizen” — and the purge was eventually halted after Florida’s county elections officials, including 30 Republicans, rebelled against the purge.

Throughout this ordeal, which also included a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit challenging the purge and a pledge by a top Scott Administration official to restart the purge, Scott insisted this purge was necessary to prevent non-citizen voters from changing the result of the 2012 election.

Now, Scott has begun a second voter purge, albeit under greater scrutiny after the debacle that was his first attempt to prevent Floridians from voting. Despite Scott’s previous claims that non-citizen voting is a major problem worthy of a massive voter purge, his own data now undermines this claim. After comparing a state database of drivers licenses with a federal database of immigration records, Rick Scott’s Florida barely uncovered any potential non-citizen voters:

In total, Scott’s quest for non-citizen voters flagged only 198 names of registered voters who may not be U.S. citizens — and this is in a state where over 8 million people voted in the last presidential election. Of these 198 possible non-citizens, only 39 have actually ever voted. If any of the 198 names identified by Scott’s new purge turn out to be non-citizens — itself an uncertain proposition — the most likely explanation for why many of them became registered to vote is that they accidentally registered while filling out paperwork to receive a driver’s license, not that the alleged non-citizens intentionally tried to register illegally.

Texas State Rep. Jim Murphy (R)

State Rep. Jim Murphy (R) told ThinkProgress on Monday that if he had his druthers, Texas would “purge the rolls sooner or suspend voters.” Murphy, who last year authored some of Texas’s new restrictions on voter registration groups, argued that if a voter hadn’t voted “in some time,” that person’s registration should be suspended unless they respond to a letter from the state.

KEYES: What do you see coming down the pike as the next wave of legislation on election integrity? Are there other things that come to mind that you’ve been percolating with, trying to make happen but maybe the timing’s not quite right?

MURPHY: I would like to see us purge the rolls sooner or suspend voters. We have places where you have over 100 percent of voters in the county register. When you move, you don’t un-register yourself, you just move. We ought to have a way if someone hasn’t voted in some time that you can be put on suspense and you can send them a letter that says, ‘Are you still there? Are you still around?’

Listen to it:

Texas has already taken steps to try to disenfranchise infrequent voters. In June, the state began targeting 300,000 eligible voters in a purge, but the process relied on outdated information and procedures that were riddled with error. These problems led one Houston election official to refuse to purge voters because the state didn’t “provide any assurance of the accuracy of their list.” Texas already has one of the lowest registration rates in the country, without purging eligible voters.

Murphy, who represents a Houston-based district, spoke on Monday at a candidates’ forum put on by the King Street Patriots, a tea party group recently profiled by the New York Times for its efforts to challenge largely-minority voters at the polls. After narrowly losing his race in 2008, Murphy prevailed in a 2010 rematch, allowing him to push anti-voter legislation during the 2011-12 session. He told ThinkProgress that King Street Patriots, and their subsidiary True The Vote, were “absolutely helpful” in his 2010 race and he was “thankful” for their poll-watching efforts.

Florida has officially restarted it’s controversial purge of registered voters less than 6 weeks before election day. Governor Scott’s intention to resume the effort, detailed in a PowerPoint presentation, was first reported by ThinkProgress.

Initially, Florida identified 180,000 potential non-citizens to be purged from the voter rolls. That list was subsequently narrowed down to 2600 “sure fire” non-citizens. When it became clear in early June that even the smaller list was riddled with errors, elections officials stopped the effort.

According to the Miami Herald, Florida has sent just 198 names to local election supervisors. (Of those, no more than 36 have ever cast a ballot.) But there is already evidence that the latest list still is not accurate. From the Herald:

For voters like Yeral Arroliga, it’s a pain.

Arroliga, 25, who immigrated from Nicaragua in 1995, said he already sent his proof of citizenship earlier this summer under the first version of the purge program. He’s ready to do it again, after ending up on the new list. But he’s not happy about it.

“It sounds like you have Big Brother watching over you,” he told The Herald. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

Of this list of 198 potential non-citizens, about 58 percent are minority — 41 percent Hispanic and 17 percent black.

Multiple election officials have spoken out against the latest purge. Volusia County Supervisor of Elections Ann McFall, a Republican, told ThinkProgress “It just doesn’t help us whatsoever… It’s awful.”