Voter Purge Happening. Be Vigilant Now.

Gov. Rick Scott has won the legal battles necessary to move ahead with a disgusting attempt to disenfranchise voters in the state of Florida. This shouldn't be a complete surprise, but nobody should think the battle for voting rights is over. Rather, now comes the moment when the agenda is revealed by facts instead of by suspicion and spoken through the voice of rhetoric.

Via ABC News, the federal courts have said Scott can attempt to purge illegal immigrants from Florida voter rolls and have access to federal databases to get it done. But don't mistake this for a defeat. This is now where Scott gets tested to see if he is a political hack or a man of his word. Readers of this blog know where my money is.

But one should understand the sad history of voter disenfranchisement in the last decade and a half in Florida. This is just a different flavor of the disenfranchise techniques practiced in the past by Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush.

As we all wrung our hands post-election in 2000 about butterfly ballots, a story sadly overlooked before the election suddenly grabbed the attention of political watchers in the state as the purge of convicted felons was dissected. Ex-felons were not allowed to vote, other than those who went through a lengthy clemency procedure, and in the name of fair democracy, then-Gov. Jeb and then-Secretary of State Harris took to cleaning felons who were wrongfully voting off the rolls.

Many liberal commentators on the national level noted this only after the painfully close 2000 vote in Florida went to the governor's brother George W., handing the presidency to the loser of the national popular vote in a painful episode in American vote-counting. Too bad it wasn't ever considered before how this practice would impact the election, but I will note that most election supervisors in Florida refused to do Harris' felon purge because of issues that arose within elections circles.

The problem, of course, was that many people on the list weren't ex-felons at all. Some had similar names and birth dates, and a disproportionate number of those people were minority voters who, should demographic exit polls offer any indication, were likely to vote Democrat in the election. I suspect having to save their own vote from a Bush-led attempt to disenfranchise them would make these particular voters even more likely to cast a ballot against W.

In 2004, the state under a new Secretary of State tried to do a purge again. I wrote about this at the time at Wired.com. Unsurprisingly, there were similar issues again. First, the state tried to prevent anyone from even looking at the list, seeing as that had created so many problems (read embarrassments and dark revelations) in 2000. When the list was made public, people quickly found new problems again and the list was put aside for that election.

Ironically, the biggest reveal then was that Hispanic voters seemed to have been left off the polls completely. Why? The most cynical explanation was that the Cuban vote was a reliable Republican voting block. Even then, the notion the Florida Hispanics were voting Republican was a bit dated, but the political conventional wisdom was still so at the time.

Today, people realize that the Hispanic vote in Florida is more likely to tilt Democratic than Republican. And low and behold, this voter purge targets Hispanic voters squarely.

Why do I bring up the 2000 and 2004 lists? Because they both reveal the ways in which the left won when the truth finally surfaced about the contents of the lists.

To date, Scott has not successfully gotten anyone purged off the voter rolls. But his efforts begin in earnest now, and now is when we see whether he is going after legitimate voters because of their ethnic heritage or if he is genuinely concerned about some secret population of illegal immigrants dilluting our vote.

Honestly, almost everybody feels people who are not American citizens should not vote in American elections. Frankly, it is hard to make an argument otherwise. The question is whether it is actually a big problem. It amuses me how big a deal Scott makes about his team ferreting out up to 1,000 people who may have voted illegally in past elections statewide. More than 8 million people voted in the 2008 election for president, and Barack Obama won the state by more than 200,000 votes. But Scott's insinuation feeds a Tea Party illusion that Obama only won four years ago because of voter fraud.

And they say we need to get over the 2000 election.

Back to point, those who care about the right to vote being preserved aren't worried about people who shouldn't vote being purged. They are afraid the true intent is to go after innocent bystanders who very likely will vote against Rick Scott's party.

Now we get to see who Scott tries to actually purge. Now we get to see if we were right.

And if we were, just as we were in the past, we can supervisors not to do the purge, or maybe stop the state from using the list at all. And that would be a win for democracy, the nonpartisan kind that genuinely matters most if our republic is ever to have credibility on the power of democracy on the world stage.