Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner says his office will soon begin forwarding the names of suspected non-citizens on the voter rolls to local elections officials. The move formally kicks off the second version of Governor Rick Scott's controversial scrubbing program.
The state has been working to finalize a procedure for using a federal list to vet registered voters since 2012. That's when Florida first struck a deal with the U-S Department of Homeland Security over the use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database.
After a Tuesday event sealing state memorabilia in a time capsule, Detzner said his office is "ready to go.""We'll start shortly after the first of the year, on a case-by-case basis, reviewing files and then forwarding them down to the supervisors", said Detzner.
Detzner said his office has sent a proposed "memorandum of agreement" to the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, which represents county election chiefs.
Once signed, it will allow local supervisors to double-check the information of a suspected non-citizen to make sure no eligible voters are removed from the rolls.
State officials are trying to avoid a repeat of their first try at preventing suspected non-citizens from voting last year.
That effort was pushed by Scott but ground to a halt after complaints from elections supervisors that the lists they were given were riddled with errors.