Florida purges eligible voters
Under Republican Governor Jeb Bush, the state led an effort to enforce a law that barred ex-felons from voting. As a result, Florida purged 58,000 names from voter rolls in the 2000 presidential election. Republican candidate George W. Bush, the governor’s brother, won that controversial election when the Supreme Court declared him the winner in Florida. The margin of victory in Florida was 537 votes. The following year, an investigation found that at least 1,100 eligible voters had been wrongly removed from the rolls. Eventually, a court-ordered analysis determined that more than 12,000 eligible voters may have been wrongly purged and barred from voting.
