Broward voter rolls case has national implications

Stuart Naifeh has seen the other side, where eligible voters were snared in voter removal efforts. He is a senior counsel with the advocacy group Demos, which teamed up with the 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East union to intervene in the Broward case on behalf of the elections office.

In 2012, when Florida Gov. Rick Scott pushed counties to use a national database of non-citizens to remove ineligible voters, some eligible voters that were SEIU members were erroneously purged from the rolls, Naifeh said. The original list had 182,000 alleged non-citizens that eventually was reduced to fewer than 200.

“We got involved in this case because we’re concerned that overly aggressive efforts to purge voters off the rolls result in removing eligible people, something we’ve seen happen in other states, including Ohio and Georgia,” Naifeh said. “Ohio conducted a purge that targeted people just because they hadn’t voted recently, and as a result thousands of eligible people had their registrations canceled.”

Read more at the Sun Sentinel