Analysis: 98.4% of voters on Rick Scott's first purge list are eligible voters

The statistics that we've seen from the first round of Republican Gov. Rick Scott's Florida voter purge are pretty disturbing. The Miami Herald uncovered the fact that 58 percent of the people on the initial list sent out to supervisors to be scrubbed off the voting rolls were Hispanic, even though they represent just 13 percent of the voting population. According to the paper's analysis, in addition to Hispanics, Democratic and independent voters were more likely to be on the list.

That's bad, but further analysis from ElectionSmith, Inc. makes it even worse. They've found that 98.4 percent of the 2,625 people included on that first list as "potential noncitizens" are eligible voters. That's quite an error rate.

Only 41 registered voters residing in 13 counties'this is out of the 2,625 names flagged by the Florida SOS as 'potential noncitizens''were removed from the rolls.

In other words, 98.4% of the 2,625 people identified by the Florida SOS as 'potential noncitizens' remain on the rolls because the Supervisors of Elections found insufficient evidence that they were ineligible to be registered voters.

That's a really crappy list. It's hard to imagine how many on Scott's secret list of suspected non-citizens are eligible voters. But if it's consistent with the failure rate on the smaller sample, it'd be about 177,000. That's a lot of voters not committing voter fraud.