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EXCLUSIVE: GOP Election Supervisor Blasts Florida’s Lawsuit Against Feds, Won’t Restart Purge Regardless Of Outcome

Even if Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) administration prevails in its new lawsuit against the Obama administration, his efforts to purge voters before November’s election still faces a major obstacle — the county elections supervisors, including 30 Republicans, who have the ultimate authority over the voting rolls.

Republican Ann McFall, county supervisor of elections for Volusia County, told ThinkProgress that the lawsuit does not have her support and she will not resume purging voters before the elections, regardless of the suit’s outcome:

No I do not support the lawsuit. It is [about] helping the Governor and Secretary of State improve their image. I am not doing any further voter purge until after Nov 2012.

After every one of Flordia’s 67 Democratic, Republican, and Independent county elections supervisors joined together last week to stop Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) error-riddled and likely illegal attempt to remove what his administration said were non-citizen voters from the voter rolls, Scott is pursuing a new tactic in his voter suppression campaign. Yesterday, he announced he will sue the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in an attempt to get more accurate immigration data than the wildly-inaccurate earlier list his administration had originally claimed contained “sure-fire” non-citizens. A DHS representative told the Orlando Sentinel last week that even their list would not provide Florida with an accurate picture of who is and is not a U.S. citizen.

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McFall’s fellow Republican Jerry Holland, supervisor of elections for Duval County, told ThinkProgress that he does support the Scott administration’s lawsuit. But even he did not commit to resuming the purge, saying he would do “what ever the law requires and permits.”

Update:

Palm Beach Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher (D) told ThinkProgress that she too opposes the lawsuit and would only begin a purge based on it if the courts rule that doing so would not violate the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, or the Voting Rights Act.