In Florida, subverting democracy to help Repubs has a long history.
Hillary Clinton revisits Florida's 2000 and 2004 voter purge when Jeb Bush was governor
PolitiFact - Hillary Clinton revisits Florida's 2000 and 2004 voter purge when Jeb Bush was governor
After the election, news organizations and other groups tried to figure out how many people had been denied the right to vote. But the
numbers varied widely — though the reported estimates were higher than George W. Bush’s 537-margin in the 2000 presidential election. A 2001
Palm Beach Post investigation asserted that at least 1,100 eligible voters were wrongly purged. Other reports put the figure much higher.
The NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union sued the state in 2000, and the settlement required the state to run its old felon lists with new standards.
At a hearing before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in January 2001, Bush placed the blame for the state’s woes on election officials. But a divided commission
concluded that many Florida leaders were responsible, including Bush, for the "unjust removal of disproportionate numbers of African American voters."
A week later, Bush along with the Cabinet implemented the commission’s recommendation to make the clemency process easier for ex-felons seeking to restore their voting rights.
Botched purge in 2004
The state compiled a new list of 47,000 potential felons before the 2004 election. But after a lawsuit forced the state to make the list publicly available in July 2004, the
Miami Herald reported that more than 2,000 of those names -- many of them black Democrats -- should not have been on the list, because their rights to vote were restored through the state's clemency process.
A separate issue was that Hispanics made up 0.1 percent of the list, in a state where nearly one in five residents were Hispanic.
The state’s criminal database didn’t have "Hispanic" as a category, but voter registration rolls did have it, which created a discrepancy.
Less than two weeks after the list was released, the state
scrapped the entire list, saying it was flawed.
